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News in Colours
Escape into Colour
The revival of the economy in the USA is resulting in an increased interest in bright colours, merchants and consumers alike are stocking up on colours that are anything but understated -- "from hot pinks to rich oranges, deep plums and acid greens, the expanding rainbow of vivid shades marks the strongest surge of colour since the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Looking for an escape into colour is one way of feeling good again after a decade of uncertainty culminating in the events of September 11th, 2002.
Colour Preferences
The forces driving colour preferences are socioeconomic rather than aesthetic. "Colour trends actually have more to do with Afghanistan than Milan." Colour forecasters review environmental, social, political and economic conditions to predict future colour preferences. All these factors influenced by age, sex, race and status determine our colour preferences. Also, colours change more rapidly in developed markets, but otherwise follow a gradual four to seven year cycle.
Colour Technology for Fabrics
Using a technique to manipulate coloured oils, Dutch scientists are developing moving images on a thin foldable screen that could be used to construct clothes and interior furnishings, according to a report in the journal Nature.
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Blind people to 'see' colour by touch
Blind people may be able to 'see' images created by a computer program that translates colour images into textured graphics, according to a Polish researcher. The research was published on the physics website arXiv, which is owned and operated by Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
The computer program by Artur Rataj, from the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Computer Science at the Polish Academy of Sciences, is said to be the first to put colour into tactile graphics, images that blind people can 'read' by touch.
There are several ways of translating images for blind people in the same way writing is translated into braille. One way uses braille dots spaced closely together. Another uses vacuum-treated plastic wrapped over 3-D sculptures of the image. But the vacuum-treated plastic method is expensive and time-consuming.
Images can also be made into tactile graphics, which use raised lines and dashes to represent a picture. Using fingers, visually impaired or blind people can get a feel for the details of images. Until now, these had been in black and white.
But a computer could assign different textures to colours, Rataj said. His program detects the edge of objects in the image and then assigns a primary colour to different parts of the image.
Each colour is represented by rows of dashes at different angles. For example, yellow is represented by rows of vertical dots and blue by rows of horizontal dots. Colour is simplified so there is only one blue, not shades of light or dark blue.
Combination colours, like orange, are made by using dashes angled at a direction halfway between red and yellow. The intensity of the colour depends on the density of the raised dashes. More dashes mean brighter colours.
Identifying the colours in an image may help people recognise the image, Rataj said, who is testing his method with blind people.
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The color of honey: a sweetener that bee-devils food spoilage
Honey comes in varying shades--from almost colories to darker than molasses--reflecting the particular nectars that bees harvested to make this natural sweetener.
Color innovations biggest news in hair care
Innovation in hair color, in particular, created most of the excitement as manufacturers raced to launch new color treatments for America's growing demographics, such as baby boomers and teens, and untapped groups such as men. Shampoo and conditioners also registered several new entries, as mass retail for the first time stocked SKUs made for colored hair. Overall in 1998, the hair care category, which includes shampoo, conditioner, hair color and styling aids, rang approximately $1.3 billion in sales in the drug store class of trade.
Ancient Dye Methods
The secret of imperial purple has been rediscovered. Retired engineer John Edmonds found that the key was to ferment the pigment, which comes from a gland of a Mediterranean shellfish called murex, in a vat for ten days. The result is a dye that appears green but when wool is used and then exposed to the air, it turns a deep purple. He found that covering the vat produced imperial purple, which was worn only by Roman emperors, but uncovering it produced tekhelet, a blue dye used to colour tassels worn by devout Jews. The secrets of both dyes had long been lost.
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