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Tanning beds, sun showers, auto irradiation booths or
whatever you want to call them are big boxes full of UV
lamps that people occasionally put themselves in for a
variety of reasons. The current technology is just to line up
a whole load of low pressure discharge lamps which are
optimized
for the near UV spectrum and have people be
near them. These lamps aren't particularly efficient and in
attempting to locally simulate the sun, they take up space
and produce a lot of heat.
There's a big push in the LED world to develop high-power
low-cost equivalents. The advantages would be enormous,
greater efficiency, longer life and more compact designs
that would likely be practical for home use.
The UV light emitted by these devices is more than capable
of damaging your eyes. This is particularly true because
unlike the sun, they're heavily biased toward the UV, so
they're super bright in a way you can't see. For that reason,
all your normal reactions to bright light don't work and you
don't protect yourself.
That home tanning beds will be a thing, and that people
are predictably slapdash about safety in the familiar
environment of their homes, will likely lead to some cases
of eye damage no matter how many warning labels you
add.
To stop this, simply add a few hundred watts of LED light
in the very-much-visible part of the spectrum. As long as
these turn on a moment before the UV LEDs, anyone
without those little goggles, or just open eyes will go
"aaagh! that's bright" and promptly add goggles/close eyes,
restoring the existing safety mechanism.
You can sell it how you like, "full spectrum phototherapy"
"deep penetration - reaches the parts other beds miss"
whatever.
different colors of lucifrases
http://www.targetin.../drug-discovery.php [beanangel, Jan 12 2018]
More on different colours of luciferase
https://www.nature....rticles/ncomms13718 With graphs, and even some error bars! [Wrongfellow, Jan 12 2018]
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Annotation:
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Tanning for what purpose? |
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Modulate it, while you're at it, for a laser-printed tan. |
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In practice I suppose the resolution will be limited by how well you
can
stay still. |
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Hmm - I wonder if pulsed UV is more effective at inducing tanning
than steady UV? I remember reading that plants respond more
effectively to pulsed light, but that's probably very different
chemically. |
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It's amazing how still you can stay if you're trapped in a box and someone's aiming a high-power UV laser at you ... |
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"Do you expect me to talk ?" |
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"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to tan ..." |
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"Tanned to perfection in under 300 microseconds or your money
back!" |
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coherent light would be an unnecessary complication, and
why go to the trouble to produce a super-intense collimated
beam if you're then going to re-distribute it over time? Good
if you wanted a custom image though. |
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Certainly brings a whole new meaning to "branded product" ... |
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// Good if you wanted a custom image though. // |
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Actually, for a particular market segment, a "custom image" tan, like a temporary tattoo, could be highly desireable. It can already be achieved by simple patch masking, but a modulated laser could produce a very precise greyscale (brownscale ?) image. |
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// coherent light would be an unnecessary complication // |
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Maybe not. A laser is compact, reliable, efficient, and very accurate in terms of frequency and energy output. |
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It should be possible to develop a drive-through tanning parlour based on Bremsstrahlung. |
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WKTE at popular music festivals, where the attendees sometimes
derive amusement from finger-painting sunscreen onto the guy who's
just passed out in the sun. |
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// "deep penetration - reaches the parts other beds miss" // With the availability of low-voltage, battery-operable, low-heat LEDs, I can see a niche market along these very lines. It is a disturbing sight. |
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//I can see a niche market along these very lines. It is a
disturbing sight.// |
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If you go looking into niches, you've only got yourself to
blame if you don't like what you see. |
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Maybe the ongoing miniaturisation of electronics will lead to LEDs that
are small enough to be injected into living cells in appreciable
quantities? |
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They'd need some kind of chemical battery (maybe it could run from
genetically-modified flying lobsters, or ATP, or something), but they
would
tan from within and not without, and that's got to be
worth a few quid to the hippies. |
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You'd need to licence the flying lobster technology from
MaxCo. |
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Can I pay with a quantum linked cheque from BeanieBank? |
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It might be simpler to incorporate heat lamps. I bet we
already have LEDs capable of emitting infrared. When the
tanning time is up, just add heat to the environment until it
can no longer be tolerated. |
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//They'd need some kind of chemical battery (maybe it
could run from genetically-modified flying lobsters, or ATP,
or something)// |
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Nature beat you to it by a few years, you're just describing
luciferase. |
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"Better the devil you know ..." |
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That reminds me. Are there luciferases that emit in a range of different colours? Presumably the shortest wavelength is limited by the energy available from one molecule of ATP, but how much of that energy actually ends up in the photon? Could one, in theory, engineer a luciferase that emitted at long UV? |
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[mb] There is a lucifrase called vargula that glows at 395
nm which is just barely in the human visible range. Perhaps
it could be improved. more colors at [link] |
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Why not tattoo with a melanin-based dye ? Wouldn't that be "tanning by any other name" ? |
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Why _would_ you tattoo with a melanin-based dye, when you can do
it with lasers, biotech and flying lobsters? |
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Sheer perverse wrongness, obviously ... |
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//is a lucifrase called vargula that glows at 395 nm// Hmm. The paper shows it glowing at 465nm (with FRET-linked fluorescent proteins giving longer wavelengths). But it's a cool paper! |
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