The Editors at Very Cool Facts

Right now, in backyards and gardens across New England, fireflies are making light from a single chemical reaction. No electricity, no filament, no waste. Just a blink perfected over 540 million years. Scientists have been watching that reaction for decades. What they found may change medicine. The chemistry behind it is elegant. A molecule called luciferin reacts with oxygen in the presence of an enzyme called luciferase, producing a precise burst of light. The name luciferin comes from the...

Nature's Master Chemists Some flowers contain small amounts of caffeine in their nectar. Studies suggest the compound may help bees remember a flower's scent, making them more likely to return in the future. For the flower, that can mean more pollination. Other plant and fungal chemicals found their way into coffee, medicines, and, in several unusual cases, hallucinations so strange that numerous patients reported remarkably specific, similar experiences. Chili peppers take a different...

You Are Electric You have a tiny spinning motor inside nearly every cell, powered by electricity, running continuously, right now, as you read this. Understanding what that actually means took centuries of argument and at least two Nobel Prizes. It started, as you may remember from school, with a frog. In the 1780s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani was experimenting with electrical current when he noticed that touching a charged metal instrument to a dead frog's leg made it twitch. He...