Why Are Monkey Butts So Colorful?
Mandrill Wikimedia CommonsPlus, the best colored monkey butts on the internet! Click to launch the gallery. If you're anything like me, you may have wondered why some monkeys have bright blue skin. Even if you don't pay careful attention to monkey butts, you may still have wondered what makes some people's eyes blue. To answer these questions, it is important to first understand how light interacts with living stuff, which we call biological tissue. Light is a collection of little packets of energy, called photons, that whiz through the air. Photons come in all different colors, and when these colors are all together, we see white light (like sunlight or light from a light bulb). But photons of different colors act differently when they enter biological tissue. You can think of a photon as a drunk person walking through a forest. The drunk person enters the forest and walks into...