Category: IR
One way to tell if a plant is a plastic fake or not is to touch a leaf. If it feels cool, the plant is a real one. Have you ever wondered why a leaf feels cool? (A leaf of an indoor plant always rests at about the room temperature, plastic or real. It …
Is a moth warm-blooded or cold-blooded? If you google this, some would tell you it is cold-blooded. They are not completely right. This infrared study shows how a moth warms up before it flies. So at least a moth is warm-blooded when it moves.Click to …
A bumble bee.
I have been wanting to see what I can do with IR imaging in my backyard. Folks at the Discovery and Animal Planet channels use IR imaging regularly to show thermal patterns of animals and plants. So I guess I could do something with…
Yesterday I reported evidence of tiny water permeation across a piece of paper on top of a cup of water. In order to double-check my theory, I placed a piece of transparency film on top of another cup of water and left the two cups overnight. When I ca…
I have blogged about some intriguing IR images when a piece of paper is placed on top of a cup of water. The part of paper above the water warms up (Figure 1) because of the release of latent heat of condensation of water vapor to its underside. If you…
I have been “shopping” for a learning theory that can frame the value added by IR visualization to hands-on experiments. Here is a candidate theory.There are four learning pathways to the brain: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile. Theory has it…
The Journal of Chemical Education, published by the American Chemical Society, selects my paper “Visualizing Chemistry with Infrared Imaging” as the cover article on the July 2011 issue. The IR experiments presented in the paper were described as “capt…
I just got a quote from a FLIR sale representative that they now offer 25% educational discount for their products. This means for an I3 camera that is listed as $1,195, the educational price is now $896.25. For an I5 camera, the educational price is n…
As the 18th century British chemist Sir Humphry Davy put it, “nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.” True for infrared imaging, especially when it is used as an educational tool to advance …
Metals feel colder because they conduct heat faster, not because they are really “colder.” This is often a misconception from students. A very simple IR experiment may dispel this misconception by visualizing what is going on when you touch a piec…