Science Memes

11945 readers

2610 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
Keep it rooted (on topic).
No spam.
Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

[email protected]

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

449

GTFO (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

I don't get it, but I do have deuteranopia.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

You have probably heard that plants are green. They are green because they reflect green light

They reflect green light because they can't absorb all of it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Nope! Plants do absorb green light, but since the sun is green, it would be too intense to do it all at once, so they reflect it back as to not overheat, and to let other parts of the plants to absorb it.

Now, you may be asking me, "What do you mean the sun is green?" The sun isn't yellow, it's white, but blue gets stripped out by Rayleigh scattering. "But then how is it green?" White is green as an even temperature white light has a dominant wavelength in green, but a large bandwidth into blue and red. Same reason we use green materials like silver, aluminum, and soda lime glass.

[–] Adalast 1 points 1 week ago

This is actually old wisdom, at least as to why plants are green. There was a discovery a couple years back that green light alone actually can cause water to evaporate well above the thermal limit. Since evolution is best modeled as an energy minimization problem, the fact that the least energy required to retain moisture is accomplished by being green is why chlorophyll is green.

https://news.mit.edu/2023/surprising-finding-light-makes-water-evaporate-without-heat-1031

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (4 replies)