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About "Ask A Scientist!"
On September 17th, 1998 the Ithaca Journal ran its first "Ask A Scientist!" article in which Professor Neil Ashcroft , who was then the director of CCMR, answered the question "What is Jupiter made of?" Since then, we have received over 1,000 questions from students and adults from all over the world. Select questions are answered weekly and published in the Ithaca Journal and on our web site. "Ask A Scientist!" reaches more than 21,000 Central New York residents through the Ithaca Journal and countless others around the world throught the "Ask a Scientist!" web site.
Across disciplines and across the state, from Nobel Prize winning scientist David Lee to notable science education advocate Bill Nye, researchers and scientists have been called on to respond to these questions. For more than seven years, kids - and a few adults - have been submitting their queries to find out the answer to life's everyday questions.


With this background information about color, then we can rephrase the question to the following one: what is the smallest amount of a substance that can still absorb light or emit light? The answer to this is a single atom, or ion, or molecule, depending on how the color is generated. For example, burning a single sodium ion would also produce yellowish light just as burning a chunk of table salt. The size of a single atom or ion can be as few as one angstrom (one angstrom is 0.1 nm) in diameter, while a single molecule can be made up of several to millions of atoms.
On the other hand, by rephrasing the question, we assume that our eyes can detect light emitted from any amount of substance, which is certainly not true (I wish I could have that kind of eyes, then I would have vision even better than Superman's). In reality, the amount of light produced from a single atom or a single molecule is too weak to be seen by our eyes. But scientist can use specialized equipment to detect light emitted from a single molecule in some cases. For example, some scientists are using "single-molecule fluorescence microscopy" to study interesting molecules, such as proteins and DNA.
Related Questions
- Why are the boiling points of metals with metallic bonds so varied?
- What causes certain sounds to be unique even though they are on the same frequency?
- Why can squirrels touch the telephone wires and not get electricuted?
- Are there any nontoxic ingestible fluorescent materials?
- What are electromagnets and what metals are included?
- How is glass made?
- Are there any nontoxic ingestible fluorescent materials?
- Why are some musical instruments still made out of wood instead of using new types of materials like plastic?
- What material is flame made of?
- If you take a substance like water and were able to get it to absolute zero, where supposedly the molecules would cease to move, and then you reheated it, would the molecules recover and start to move again?







