A lightbulb has been illuminating a firehouse in Livermore, CA continuously for more than 100 years. Known as the Centennial Light, the hand-blown carbon filament lightbulb has only been turned off a handful of times. The bulb is now attached to a generator to minimize future power disruptions. To see for yourself, check out this 24-hour live web feed of the bulb.

As unlikely as it may seem, the Centennial light is not the only lightbulb that has been burning for an improbably long time. The Palace Theater lightbulb in Fort Worth, TX, has been burning almost as long. Theories as to why these lightbulbs could last so long include that these bulbs have a particularly perfect vacuum seal, that the lights have been turned on and off minimally and that the bulbs are powered at low wattage.

Just in time for the holidays, research out of Naomi Halas‘s group at Rice University shows that nanoparticles can do what we’ve been waiting for all along: distill alcohol. The Halas group is known for making gold nanoshells, consisting of a 60-120nm silica core coated with 10-20nm of gold. The silica core is made colloidally by reacting silica monomers in the presence of a micellar surfactant. Then, the gold shell is applied by reducing gold ions on the surface of the silica.

These nanoparticles have interesting optical properties, including absorbances in the near infrared. The group has used these nanoshells primarily for cancer therapy due to their local heating properties. Luckily, that same surface heating effect can be used to efficiently create steam… and distill alcohol.

Researchers in Singapore are pushing the boundaries of printed color. In a recent issue of Nature Nanotechnology, Joel Wang and coworkers report a method of printing diffraction-limited pixels using the structural color of metallic nanostructures. Structural color refers to materials which derive their pigment from the interaction of tiny mico- or nanometer structures with light, rather than the absorption of light that occurs in most organic dyes. The light scattered by silver, for examples, can be different colors depending on the structure (size, shape, aspect ratio) of the metal at the nano-scale. In this recent paper, the idea of structural color is refined to create extremely high resolution printing. Specifically, arrays of nanometer-scale glass posts are coated with silver; the size and spacing of the posts controls the color of each pixel consisting of a 2×2 post subarray. The result is a remarkably reproduced Lena image, a standard test in the imaging community.