ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Boffins are funny – I love them, mixing stuff up, running electricity through stuff, stitching body parts together and helping teenage boys get back into their own time with the use of Plutonium substitutes and industrial cable.

Fab, fantastic, wonderful . . . just do it over THERE so that I am out of the blast area.

Having a Lab coat and crazy hair comes with its own downsides – and the maniacal laughter and the secret volcano lair don’t help the social interaction either, but sometimes Researchers as we will call them from now on, come out of their lairs and unleash on the world their genius and its – often shambling – offspring.

One such Evil Lair Institute, is Oregon State University in the USA have recently been mixing stuff and heating it up. All good there I hear you say. But wait . . . there’s more. During one of their experiments they made a discovery (and not the one they were expecting – tho’ the original reason for the experiment is not explained). They discovered Blue – or rather, what is described as a New Blue.

The New York Times title on their Web Article is entitled: By Happy Accident, Chemists Produce a New Blue With the Journal Of The American Chemical Society publishing some rather more technical information

Now call me silly – but the last time I looked through a Pantone Book (Every night before I go to sleep . . .) there were HUNDREDS of Blues! Thousands! To be fair – the New York Times article explains that the current processes for attaining blue pigments are very expensive, are a bit poisonous and tend to fade. As the article explains – the material used for this New Blue are just as expensive. So – not much improvement there then. The whole thing seems to have been rushed out as a PR story. Come back when you have completed the testing – with the alternative, cheaper materials and have a solution to the problem that we did not know we had. A New Blue? Pah.