A globe-trotting quest to find blue in the natural world - and to understand our collective obsession with this bewitching colour. Blue is a rare colour - natural blue, that is. From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue - and most that appear so are doing sleight of hand with physics or complex chemistry. Flowers modify the red pigment anthocyanin to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light. Yet this hard-to-spot accent colour in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. His quest to find and understand his favorite colour and its hallowed place in our culture takes him to a gene-splicing laboratory in Japan, a volcanic lake in Oregon, and to Brandenburg, Germany - home of the last Spix's macaws. From deep underground where blue minerals grow into crystals to miles away in space where satellites gaze down at our "blue marble" planet, wherever we do find blue, it always has a story to tell.

About the Author
Kai Kupferschmidt studied molecular biomedicine and works as a science writer in Berlin. He contributes to the US journal Science as well as to German newspapers such as the Suddeutsche Zeitung, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Die Zeit. Unless he takes some time off, which he then spends thinking about the colour blue. Kai Kupferschmidt has won numerous prizes, including the Media Prize of the German HIV/Aids Foundation.


Book Information
ISBN 9781615197521
Author Kai Kupferschmidt
Format Hardback
Page Count 224
Imprint The Experiment LLC
Publisher The Experiment LLC
Weight(grams) 300g