Black is hot and white is not.

I've always grown up knowing black keeps you warm and white keeps you cool. In my I'm-So-Cool-I-Wear-Big-Pants-From-Hot-Topic phase, I would always burn up in the summer. Black leather and other materials always get hotter than white objects in the sun. Tennis players always wear little white outfits to keep cool.

The way we see light has to do with color frequency and reflections. Red objects absorb more light than yellow light. It's the frequency that is reflected from the object (not absorbed) that gives our brain a color.

The reason black gets its color is because it absorbs all light rays/colors. Just light if you were to mix all the paints together, it would get black. Black does not reflect any light, and because of that it is hotter. The more light it absorbs (including from the sun) the warmer that color and that black object become.

White reflects all light instead of absorbing any, which is why it lacks color. Because it reflects these light/heat rays, it stays cooler.





Proof? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White and science class in school that I remembered.

Chameleons!! (again... wanted to be a herpetologist)

From http://www.bioteams.com/chameleon_525.jpg

Chameleons are able to change color with their surroundings. Mostly it's green and brown (to blend in with leaves/sticks) but they can change into a variety of colors. Once when I saw a photo of a chameleon in a glass cage, and the cage still had a sticker of the bar code on it. The chameleon had changed to green, brown, and blue to match where he was in the cage, but changed the top of his head white to match the sticker on the glass he was next to.

Chameleons are able to change color because the have special skin cells under their skin called "chromatophores." The top layer of those cells have red or yellow pigment and the lower layers blue or white. The chameleon consciously changes color, and the colors mix by the pigment cells growing larger or smaller. The changes in color also help with the temperature of the chameleon. Darker skin absorbs more heat from the sun when it is cold, and lighter skin will reflect it when it is hot out.

Kind of like billboards, where there are other colors mixed in with what you see as a solid color. Even in nature, primary colors are mixed to make different ones. The basic rules we have been learning by painting in class are used in nature.






Proof? http://www.yesmag.ca/Questions/Chameleon.html