"When it is dark enough,

you can see the stars." -- Charles Austin Beard

Some stories just make me smile.

When rocket scientists do something supremely cool and jerk one out of the park, the atmosphere, Earth’s orbit and lay a Tonka toy down on the surface of another world light as a feather...that’s just indisputably cool.

When that little land rover trundles off its platform and starts sniffing around, Swiss MetaArmy Knife in on actuator, and a cell phone in the other, chatting us all back on Terra up about the environs like a teenage girl running down the dateable boys in her class...that’s also just toe-curling magnificent. Both for what new knowledge it actually may uncover, and for what it says about the more hopeful and ass-kickingly angelic side of our species.

And then there’s the story where the obscure grad student researcher accidentally stumbles onto something awesome. Something that will absolutely change the world for the better, in a measurable way, with zero downside.

Something small and huge and wonderful.

Something like this from LiveScience.com:

Accidental Invention Points to End of Light Bulbs
Bjorn Carey
LiveScience Staff Writer

The main light source of the future will almost surely not be a bulb. It might be a table, a wall, or even a fork.

An accidental discovery announced this week has taken LED lighting to a new level, suggesting it could soon offer a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative to the traditional light bulb. The miniature breakthrough adds to a growing trend that is likely to eventually make Thomas Edison's bright invention obsolete.

LEDs are already used in traffic lights, flashlights, and architectural lighting. They are flexible and operate less expensively than traditional lighting.

Happy accident
Michael Bowers, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, was just trying to make really small quantum dots, which are crystals generally only a few nanometers big. That's less than 1/1000th the width of a human hair.

Quantum dots contain anywhere from 100 to 1,000 electrons. They're easily excited bundles of energy, and the smaller they are, the more excited they get. Each dot in Bower's particular batch was exceptionally small, containing only 33 or 34 pairs of atoms.

When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant color. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened.

"I was surprised when a white glow covered the table," Bowers said. "The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow."

Then Bowers and another student got the idea to stir the dots into polyurethane and coat a blue LED light bulb with the mix. The lumpy bulb wasn't pretty, but it produced white light similar to a regular light bulb.

...
If the new process can be developed into commercial production, light won't come just from newfangled bulbs. Quantum dot mixtures could be painted on just about anything and electrically excited to produce a rainbow of colors, including white.

That's the pic at the top of this post: a nano-light.

Probably too immature a technology to hope that they can crank out strings of festive lights for Fitzmas, but anyone with a functional imagination can see where this is going.

Whoo-Hoo!!!