Illuminating alum

Alum Coagulation

Illuminating Nature

At the base level of creative practice, artists often reap inspiration from their surroundings. Writers might eavesdrop on a conversation in a coffee shop and then use it in a novel, and a composer might transform sounds from his urban environment into an orchestral work. In Kelly Lanphier’s case, working at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, early on created a substantial i...

Illuminating Illumination

We introduce an active imaging method to measure scene illumination. The system implementation is divided into four steps. First, the system acquires two images: one is an ordinary image of the scene under ambient light and the other is a corresponding image in which light from the camera flash is added to the scene. Second, the image pair is analyzed to obtain an image that represents the scen...

How alum works

For more than 70 years, alum has been used as a trusty aide to improve antibody responses to vaccines. But how this aluminum-containing compound boosts the response to vaccines has been a mystery. On page 869, Kool et al. expose its mysterious mechanism; they find that alum causes cells to produce a stim-ulator of dendritic cells (DCs). DCs were once the favored hypothetical link between alum a...

Alum Induces Innate Immune Responses