|
COPYRIGHT 2006 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
It's Earth-year 6526 and you find yourself cruising interstellar space. But--drat!--your nail polish is chipped. And how will you ever restore your earthy, bronze-goddess glow so far from the tanning fight of any sunlike star? Great Hubble's ghost, what's a person to do?!
My futuristic scenario is, of course, a space-age joke, but your distress would be short-lived: Drugstore beauty products really do float around in space, sort of, and recent observations by two teams of astronomers--one led by Douglas N. Friedel, the other by Susanna L. Widicus Weaver, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--suggest that you won't have to comb the cosmos for such beauty aids. Nail polish remover--acetone--just what you need before you repaint your nails, is present in abundance, along with its distant chemical cousin 1,3-dihydroxyacetone (DHA), the active ingredient in sunless tanning lotion. The two chemicals have been detected before now, but the new...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
