Making glow-in-the-dark Strontium Aluminate | Hacker News Reader

Making glow-in-the-dark Strontium Aluminate

maurycyz.com

91 pointsLorenDB36 comments

When my kids were little, we had glow in the dark pacifiers that lasted ALL NIGHT. I still don't know what sorcery was used to accomplish that, but if any of you have little ones, the MAM brand is what we used. Being able to spot the pacifier in the crib at 5am was a huge help some nights.

And now my kids each have an extra eyeball, which has proven very useful indeed.

I have a tritium keychain that makes it delightfully easy to find my dropped keys in the dark garage.

And some GMO petunias that glow 24/7. https://www.instagram.com/p/C8_Dgqvuq2C/

Tritium-lit pacifiers sure sound like a legitimate 1950s atomic age product.

There's a youtube channel from someone who finds and reports frivolous radioactive products to the NRC, getting them banned. It happens even today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BA5bw1EV5I

Not sure what the modern one are, but they will still glow in the morning hours. They are very very handy!

Same thing with kids’ toothbrush handles. Getting up in the night and seeing them glowing 5-6 hours since lights were last on is pretty impressive.

Looking for seed. Only seeing little plants (which ship terribly and cost way too much). Petunias are dead easy to grow from seed.

Not the Firefly petunia. They were engineered to not grow from a seed so they don't accidentally spread

So they make infertile seeds. Well fudge.

So cuttings or roots or whatever

EDIT

according to google they can be grown from seed. So experimentation is called for

Petunias don’t breed true, but people have gotten viable glowing seedlings from them.

Might be a mess in 10-20 years when some inevitably escape.

We had one in a pot with another plant and it got out-competed hard. I doubt it’ll be an issue. It’s not like glowing is an evolutionary advantage.

Exactly. When’s the last time you’ve seen normal petunias being invasive.

Firefly petunias need a lot of light. The entire plant (roots too) are literally burning precious energy 24/7 for the glowing. There seems to be a direct correlation between the light they receive and how long the internodes are from what I’ve seen putting them under grow lights. More light, shorter internodes.

Here in the Pacific Northwest various worm (caterpillar) larvae also love shredding them and eating through seed pods, and they are susceptible to downy mildew complexes which seem to become persistent within the plant.

They also are finicky about warmth, water and fertilizer.

They are a princess of a plant, not the next kochia or pigweed.

Honestly it would be more viable to take invasive weeds and hamper them by introducing glow genes.

I’m not surprised they don’t do that well in the PNW. It’s nothing like their home range.

Florida might be another story. I can’t imagine we have much research on the benefits of glowing plants in the wild, either.

I'd guess you'd see a significant hit to insect populations and boost to predators as their hiding places become a backlight.

A bit of a tangent, one thing I observed is that petunias are fairly sticky to the touch, even if it's not really visible. While larger insect like loopers and cutworms are fine, small weak flying insects can get caught. Both harmful fungus gnats and helpful parasitic wasps (which would normally attack worm larvae) can get caught on the leaves.

Wow, I stand corrected. I thought I read it in their FAQs but the site changed or maybe I remembered it wrong.

That is great to hear though. This makes them way more interesting to me

This is outright not true, and I’m not sure where this rumor came from.

Source: I have firefly petunias, I have seeds from hand pollenating them, and I have volunteer plants growing in the pot from seed I didn’t collect.

They are simply not guaranteed to glow because they don’t breed true. 3 out of my 5 volunteer plants glow.

Light Bio is actually pleasantly realistic in how amenable they are to non-commercial breeding. I may have even seen pollination instructions on their instagram (normally certain moths pollenate petunias, and without those you need to do so by hand yo be sure seeds take)

You can see some crossbreeding results in https://old.reddit.com/r/FireflyPetunia/

We had a pacifier chain shapped like an elphant head that included a hidden rattle. It's very useful to find it when it's indide the sheets or cloths.

Hey, I mine the stuff needed to make this stuff, but it sits as display pieces in my fluorescent cases.

34.7576, -116.2790

Lots of agate in the area, too.

Woah, two weeks ago, I just randomly boondocked a few miles directly south from there.

So Pisgah or Lavic or Amboy. All great places to escape.

Little bit further... 34°09'54.6"N 116°12'57.0"W

Was heading through JTree...

Oh that's the Homestretch mine. There is also a uranium prospect somewhere on that same southern section of mountain.

A video about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SIWcvudEPVA&pp=ygUTc3Ryb250aXV...

Pretty interesting. I knew someone years ago who made batches of borosilicate glass with this stuff. It’s difficult to work, unfortunately. The glow effect fades if you work it too much. I still have a bunch of his glow glass.

Would Strontium-90 make it glow ~permanently?

> permanently

Depends on your definition of "permanent"

With enough Strontium-90 involved, that might not be very long indeed.

"glows for your entire lifetime"

Teach a man to glow...

Huh, it very well might. 90Sr is a beta emitter, which should excite phosphorescent materials nicely. Even better, it decays into Yttrium 90, and Yttrium Aluminate is also phosphorescent (it's also the YA in YAG lasers). Anyone have some spare 90Sr we can test this with?

Well, with a 28.8 years half life it should glow a while. BUT, the largest license exempt quantity one can get iirc is 0.1 uCi. Plus it’s a fission product so good luck making it yourself. :) I don’t recommend the radioactive Boy Scout approach.

Also allow the baby to read minds and see through walls - that triggered a burst of nostalgia for the comic Strontium Dog:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium_Dog

Hey I bought this stuff on amaz. It's good. Made glow plastic (mix with epoxy), glow goo (mix with water gel)

Yeah, I've used this- I CNC shapes into plastic, then backfill with glow-epoxy. It works incredibly well with a UV lamp.

This is what is typically used in nice mechanical watch dials nowadays.

The combination of green glow and strontium somehow sounds very radioactive, even though I assume it's not a radioactive isotope they're using here

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