> Instead of mining oil or boiling vats of chemicals, Colorifix uses engineered microorganisms, (essentially programmable microbes) to grow colours in the lab.

Biotech is cool, but the title is wrong. "colour without chemicals" refers to "we don't need chemicals", e. g. industrial scale-level chemicals. But you actually do, you just use different chemicals; in particular all energy given to the bacteria, all materials needed to have them grow in the lab or in a bioreactor. All these media are also defined and need to be constantly monitored.

This is in general more efficient than in organic chemistry, but to insinuate "we need 0% chemicals" - sorry, that's also not the case. Also, the term "growing colour" is just wrong from a scientific point of view. You may have organisms grow, and they may produce some pigments in some substance - but that is not "growing colour". This is just a catchy title to make people be more interested in the topic. I think the topic is interesting without a need for catchy titles.

▲ wongarsu 4 days ago | parent [-]

From the title I was expecting that they are creating structural colors, which you could "grow" and which don't need chemicals. Finding out that it's chemical dye made by bacteria really feels misleading

▲ hfsh 3 days ago | parent [-]

I mean, even then you're growing it from chemicals. Unless you're straight up converting energy to matter (in which case, it would be kind of odd the first practical application they think of is making colors).

▲ wongarsu 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the sense that everything is chemicals, yes. But you typically wouldn't describe a butterfly growing a wing or a welder making a blue weld from metals that are normally very much not blue as "growing from chemicals". I guess you could argue about the butterfly, but I think few people would say that chemicals are involved in welding steel, despite iron, carbon and tungsten being chemical elements

	▲	defrost 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The few people that would say that chemistry is part of welding "steel" (what type of steel? what type of metal? how about aluminium? etc) includes welders. eg: https://youtu.be/nfNvuTMDXNg?t=1420 In which a good machinist from Queensland, Australia discovers a crack and states he'll have to get the metal tested before he can repair the crack. You know, to match the chemical composition, expansion rates, etc.

▲ jychang 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, the counterargument is that in theory, you can imagine a way to create structural color regardless of substrate. So imagine a technology that shines a laser on a car or a block of concrete and makes it blue; I'd argue that's correctly "without chemicals".

Of course, I doubt you can do that to any random substrate, since the color will depend on the properties of the material.

	▲	shultays 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		`So imagine a technology that shines a laser on a car or a block of concrete and makes it blue` There is something like that for sheets of steel at least https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ncEfAxkuFA And here is a video explains it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsGHr7dXLuI