Editor-in-Chief Managing EditorKevin Kunzmann Erica Averyeditor@thewhitonline.com managing@thewhitonline.comOPINION

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Halloween for kids versus college students

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As the colors on the leaves change from a beautiful bright green to count-less different shades of yellow gold, rusty brown and crimson red, it gives one an appreciation for the beauty of fall that would not be possible without colors, and more specifically, pigments.

Chlorophyll is the pigment notori-ous for giving leaves their green color, which is key in their ability to photo-synthesize. When leaves begin to fall and that chlorophyll degrades in au-tumn, the accessory pigments (ones that work in conjunction with chlo-rophyll) contained within the leaves become visible. These pigments are referred to as carotenoids.

Chlorophyll appears green because it reflects green wavelengths of light while absorbing others, especially red and blue, for energy usage. These carotenoids, however, can absorb the green light the plant is missing out on and dissipate excess light energy. Pro-tecting the plant from harm by dissi-pating harsh light energy means they are antioxidants.

This makes them great antioxi-dants for us too. These antioxidants are present in fruits and vegetables and what gives them their bright col-ors. Beta-carotene, for example, is the most widely-studied antioxidant and is what gives carrots their famous bright orange color and is where the name for carrots and carotenoids comes from.

But even though our world contains

an assortment of pigments, it wouldn’t mean anything to us unless our eyes could perceive them. The electromag-netic spectrum describes wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, and vis-ible light is just a small portion of that spectrum. It also includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultra violet, x-rays and gamma rays which all have wavelengths of light that our eyes can-not perceive.

Humans are able to see the electro-magnetic radiation that falls within the wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers as visible light in all dif-ferent colors. We are able to do this be-cause of the cells in the retina portion of our eye called cone cells. We have three types of cone cells: green, blue and red. People who are colorblind have a gene that affects these cells.

But if you think your vision is good at 20:20, think again. There are quite a few animals that can see wavelengths of light that humans can’t. For exam-ple, birds can look all the same to us, but they look completely different to each other with the addition of sight in the ultraviolet light range and as well as being able to see polarized light. Who has the coolest eyes in the animal kingdom, you ask? The mantis shrimp. We can perceive three color wave-lengths, the mantis shrimp can detect 12. In the words of Ze Frank in his “True Facts About the Mantis Shrimp” YouTube video, “Imagine a color that you can’t even imagine. Now do that nine more times.”

Besides giving our world freedom from looking dull, scientists can uti-lize light energy in research — more than that, it is fundamental to a lot of chemistry — and biochemistry-related experiments. I can’t begin to describe everything I’ve learned about spectrometry, spectrophotometry, fluorometry etc. and their applications in all my various chemistry and biol-ogy classes (not to mention it starts to get pretty complicated). For example, by far one of the coolest (and easiest to understand) is how scientists have isolated a gene for fluorescent proteins, such as green fluorescent protein, from fluorescent jellyfish and can now use them to label and “light up” differ-ent molecules within cells or as what scientists call an epitope tag, reporter gene and as a fluorophore just to name a few uses.

It can get kind of dense if you are new to the topic, but scientists can ex-ploit light energy in extraordinary and complicated ways. Just knowing that these crazy instruments and methods exist to tell a scientist how many of a certain amino acid is contained within a particular protein for example, gives one a certain appreciation for the sim-ple things like the fundamentals that provide the color of the leaves that are a staple of the fall season.

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Carly LebelColumnist

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Erica Avery Columnist

Halloween has undergone some major changes as you’ve grown up without you even re-alizing it. Sure, you still dress up, go out late at night and in-gest some stuff that’s not too great for your health, but think about how different Halloween was when you were 10 years old compared to now. At age 10, you were probably a Power Ranger or a princess, or maybe you were one of the lucky ones who had their mom make their costume. But now that you’re in college, things are different.

What’s the first word that comes to mind now when you think of Halloween? Whatever it is, I bet it isn’t candy.

At age 10, your ultimate goal was the candy. In your 20s there’s probably other consum-ables analogous to candy that adults enjoy, not just sugar. Re-gardless, when you were 10, you didn’t care about the curfew, you didn’t care about how cold your toes, hands or legs were and you didn’t even think about how bad you felt about taking five pieces of candy when the bowl only said to take one. Being 10 on Hallow-een was easy. Being in college on Halloween is a little easier, just in a different, more harmful and dangerous-to-your-health kind of way.

In college, Halloween is a straight free-for-all. There is no curfew. There aren’t any parents whistling for their kids to come home. There is “candy,” but it’s

the kind where you have to sec-ond-guess yourself and choose between remembering the night or waking up on the bathroom floor with a pumpkin on your head. Don’t even get me started on the costumes. Before I left for college, a princess meant a modest-length pink dress and a crown. Now that I‘ve been here for three years, I think it’s nec-essary to add a new definition of “college princess” to the dic-tionary. When girls change their clothes, their whole attitude changes. Princess means bow down! Boys change their clothes and they believe they’re some type of superhuman who can jump off a roof and fly.

When you were 10, Hallow-een was one day. Technically it still is, but now that you’re in

college, Halloweekend exists. Instead of celebrating this na-tional holiday for one day, we now celebrate it for three. Col-lege students look forward to it, plan for it and spend weeks thinking of the perfect cos-tume. For guys it’s easy — you have one costume and that’s it. That’s your go-to costume for the whole weekend and no one will judge you. For girls having one costume for Halloweekend is like social suicide. You’ll never be able to live it down. You were a nerd two days in a row? Forget it, you’re not cool.

Despite all this, what Hal-loween really comes down to is a weekend full of makeup, cos-tumes and having fun — may-be a little too much fun with a bunch of people in a crowded

house. Maybe you’ll remember it, maybe not. But as Halloween approaches, I hope all of you stay safe and remember to say thank you to the kind strangers who gave you the candy.

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