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Failure: The Blog  

August 2018

  • When This Executive Was Fired, He Took Charge
  • Obeying The Speed Limit Has Never Been More Fun
  • London Black Cabs Helped Uber Grow
  • Bette Graham Created A Product To Fix Her Mistakes
  • Flamin' Hot Cheetos Had An Interesting Start

July 2018

  • Fear This Instead Of Failure
  • Re-Releasing Songs Created Success
  • A CEO's Purposeful Mistake
  • The Tardy Student And The Unsolvable Problem
  • Fixing Potholes Through Graffiti

June 2018

  • A Surprising Mistake In The Oxford English Dictionary
  • US Army Embraces Mistakes
  • Blocking A Hymn
  • Eddie Shore Was Truly A Tough Guy
  • [Video] Elon Musk Didn't "Pivot" He Failed

May 2018

  • 8 Examples of Mental Toughness Part 2
  • Necessity Turned Accessory: Allen Iverson's Sleeve
  • This Doctor Has Continued To Fail
  • 8 Examples of Mental Toughness
  • MIT Accidentally Creates New Smelting Process

April 2018

  • Johnny Cash Quit Singing Lessons
  • Cruise Control Came Out of Frustration
  • Time Spent Gaming Pays Off In The Navy
  • Rock Around The Clock Was a Commercial Failure
  • Sigmund Freud Should Have Been Discouraged

March 2018

  • Superman Couldn't Fly
  • This School Shares Failures
  • Jim Croce's Parents Hoped He Would Fail

[More archives...]

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Stephen Hawking Won’t Get A Voice Upgrade »

Dying Stars Give Us Paint

July 31st, 2017 - by Robby Slaughter

A dying star sounds terribly morbid, doesn’t it? A light winked out. Yet we paint our barns red because of the physics of star death!

dying star barn
Photo © Flickr User Christian Collins

Do you know how we get the color red? Yonatan Zuger from Google explained it to Smithsonian in a recent article:

Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red. It’s really cheap because it’s really plentiful. And it’s really plentiful because of nuclear fusion in dying stars.”

As soon as a dying star hits 56 nucleon, it falls apart, which gives us our source of iron among many other things. But iron is important because it’s actually what makes red paint. Every barn is painted with the failure of a star!

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