From gas lamps to LEDs and medical lasers, a panel of artists, scientists and theorists asks what role light plays in the discovery of new frontiers in art, design, technology and medicine? With artists Roger Hiorns and Flow Motion, professor and engineer Harald Hass and professor of physics Kishan Dholakia. This event will be chaired by Sean Cubitt. […]
Artist Susan Schuppli leads a walk in Tate Modern’s surrounding area reflecting on the materiality of sunsets and the politics of light. Why is the sun now setting further west in the arctic regions? How do atmospheric pollutants supercharge the colours of our sunsets? When the sun goes down our AM radio reception fade and […]
Human history has been a quest to light the dark, but today most of humanity spends more time bathed in electronic light than our primary source: the sun. What different forms of light are we exposed to, and can we ever switch off? A panel of artists, scientists and architects examine our contemporary urban experiences of […]
What does society keep in the dark, and how can it be illuminated? Labern&Lloyd of the Drawing Shed, working here as The Light Collectors, collaborate with scientists hosted by The Institute of Physics. Together they invite you to engage in an afternoon of Black Light, with open conversation and research. Framed by an installation drawn from […]
How does light transform through photography? Mobile photography has become a global medium and an established form of visual communication. In the lead up to Light and Dark Matters, Oliver Lang invites you and your mobile phone camera to capture the transformational effects of light and share them on Instagram. In a special event, a selection […]
Join Royal Society University Research Fellow Lucie Green to walk and talk about the activity and atmosphere of our nearest star, the Sun. Green studies the immense magnetic fields in the Sun’s atmosphere which sporadically erupt into the Solar System. Find out what would happen if these eruptions reached the Earth and how that could […]
How does light help us understand space and time? How does it shape our material world and how do we shape light through technology, architecture, art and design? Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and internationally acclaimed artist Liliane Lijn discuss the power of light, its transformative and […]
A leap into quantum computing: research from Stanford University details how huge amounts of information could be processed by a ‘supercomputer’ that uses light
Enter into the Bacteria Light Lab. Bask in the light of bioluminescent bacteria, learn about the quantum effects of light in whole-genome sequencing, investigate historical heliotherapy and modern cutting-edge laser light treatments to combat infection, create your own light-reactive bacteria ‘pet’, and vote in a bacteria beauty contest.
New evidence from the forests of Brazil sheds light on glowing mushrooms…
Sound and Vision from Thursday’s Lit Up Fringe event
Science Showoff, the chaotic science cabaret night has joined up with the International Year of Light to bring you a whole evening of fun-packed science performance with light in it. Well, most of you will be using your eyes to see the performances so light will be involved.
Join Imperial researchers and student societies as they bring the science of light out of the shadows for an evening of light entertainment
In the International Year of Light, join astrophysicist Roberto Trotta to discover what the oldest light in the cosmos, the luminous echo of the Big Bang itself, can tell us about the fundamental nature of the Universe
As part of the International Year of Light, an image showing insect trails around a floodlight
Circadian rhythms run the biological world like clockwork. Madeleine Hurry explains how they work, from the genes in a bacterium to the human brain
Themes of the last fortnight have been GM crops, the circadian eye and stem cell bath doubts …
The first wave of retinal prosthetics can return some sensation to the eyes of blind people. But in future could we restore realistic vision …
It’s the physical processes of refraction, reflection and constructive interference that create the explosion of colour in this giant bubble …
Think lightsabres are only possible in a galaxy far, far away? If we replace the photons with plasma, they may not be so out of reach…
Scientists have created a Star Trek style tractor beam (but it’s very small) …
‘Time cloaks’ not only sound cool, but also offer exciting new technological possibilities…
The idea of invisibility cloaking – being able to hide things from view – has been a point of interest to humans for thousands of years. Plato wrote in The Republic about The Ring of Gyges which allowed the wearer to become invisible. Within nature there are many different species of creatures that have evolved […]
With the New Year comes the inevitable question of resolutions – how will you better yourself in 2012? The familiar answers of getting fit, losing weight, saving money and the like are a bit jaded, although surprisingly resolutions have been proven to make a huge difference to how we accomplish our desired goals. With this […]
Harald Haas and his team from the University of Edinburgh have invented what he calls “speaking light”. In a TED talk on 15 July, Haas demonstrated the wireless transmission of HD video via a rapidly blinking desk lamp. The trick involves quickly modulating the intensity of “high-brightness” LEDs, allowing binary-encoded data to be sent to […]
The most recent financial crisis caused by the housing bubble, which popped as subprime mortgages in the US and many Western European countries defaulted, has been having dramatic consequences in many aspects of Western Europe and US economies such as high rate of unemployment and economical policies based on ”cut if you can”. Stock market […]
It’s 3am. The cold light of my computer screen illuminates my face, highlighting the bags that are forming under my eyes and casting disturbing shadows around my bedroom. You might think that I was engaged in something incredibly important to keep me up so late. But no, the truth is, I am unable to sleep […]
Although I am a massive fan of all this warm weather and cloudless sky, the inevitable rise in the pollen count does tend to put a downer on this time of year. However, this year I seem to be escaping the usually debilitating side effects of hay fever. I am, however, not quite as smug […]
Take yourself into the middle of nowhere and hold a radio receiver to the sky. Above the snapcracklepop of static, you might just be lucky enough to catch a whistler. Sounding like weaponry from an early sci-fi film, whistlers are the remnants of lightning strikes that have travelled tens of thousands of miles through space […]
5. The ultrasound gun The sonic devastator Imagine the sound of fingernails scraping down a blackboard, then amplify it to 130 decibels (which is equivalent to a jet plane taking off) and you begin to understand how the Sonic Devastator got its name. Designed for riot control, the hand-held gun’s design restricts its beam to […]