Colors

The desert-dwelling Namaqua chameleon has a pretty neat trick – it changes skin color to stay cool when outdoor temperatures rise, and stay warm when they drop. An experimental new coating could one day do the same thing for our homes.

With regular felt pens, users are limited to the colors of the pens in a set. As you might have guessed, though, the Colorpik Pen is different – it can reproduce 16 million colors, which are scanned from the user's environment.

Lighter colors are cooler than darker ones, which can limit the practical palette choices for your clothes, car or house. A new material, inspired by butterfly wings, can produce vibrant colors while reflecting 100% of light to keep them cooler.

Imagine if there were inexpensive 3D-printed sensors that changed color to show us if something had gotten too warm or was subjected to too much stress. Well, there soon could be – and they'll biodegrade once discarded, to boot.

A new light-activated ink can change color on demand. It’s made up of colored microbeads that rise in response to different wavelengths of light to change a surface color, which could be useful for new displays or active camouflage systems.

Traditional paint gets it color from synthetic pigments, which fade over time and aren't very eco-friendly. There may soon be a better alternative, though, in the form of a paint which incorporates color-producing nanostructures.

Startup Duovox has launched a compact night vision camera with a custom Sony sensor and advanced algorithms at its heart that effectively turn night into day, bringing the full color experience to after-dark hikes in the mountains.

It can get tiresome, continually having to tell groups of children – or even adults – to be quiet. That's where a new sound-sensitive lamp comes in, as it does the job for you by changing color in response to rising noise levels.

Digital data storage is far from permanent. The data on your hard drive or flash drive probably won't last more than a few decades, but Harvard researchers have created what they say is a much longer-term alternative using spots of glowing dye.

Although some people may think that electric cars can run forever, their motors do wear out over time. According to a new study, special dyes could allow drivers and mechanics to know when that time is about to come.

Imagine if you were a product designer who wanted to see what an actual physical object would look like in different colors or patterns. Well, MIT has designed a system that allows users to easily do just that, utilizing photochromic dyes.

It may seem like a basic color, but blue is actually rather rare in the natural world. That complicates the search for natural blue food colorings, but now a team of scientists has found a promising candidate hiding in red cabbage.