A recent National Geographic article had a great quote: "If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America—and the Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic-wrapped snacks—their plastic trash would likely still be around, four centuries later." There are numerous articles and videos throughout the news and web talking about the problem with plastic pollution. When you peruse many of the articles they like to focus i

We are taught growing up that water is blue, but some rivers are black, brown, emerald blue, green, or even blue-green. So what gives these rivers their colors? First we need to understand what color is. Natural light is actually made up of a number of different colors associated with different wave lengths within the light spectrum. Think of the multiple colors of light when refracted by a prism. The color we associate with anything is the range of light waves that is reflec