Awesome Black Light

Baseball is usually played in the daytime or under bright stadium lights. Virginia’s Tri-City Chili Peppers play a special series of “Cosmic” night games under bright ultraviolet lights. Everything from the team’s uniforms to the baseballs, bats, bases, and confetti are saturated in fluorescent colors that glow brilliantly in the black light.

The guys over at Gadgetify rounded up some really cool and unusual chess sets, including Rabbit Tanaka’s set, which has a blacklight-illuminated chess board along with UV-reactive pieces. This appears to be a relic of the 1990s, but you can get a glow-in-the-dark chess set from Etsy shop Crafty Canvas, and just BYO black light.

Undone honors Mexico’s celebration of the dead with its glowing skull watch. The Calavera is decorated with fluorescent paint, which glows under UV light. Its smoked glass caseback features a guitar-playing skeleton and the famous phrase “Todos Somos Calaveras,” a reminder that we are all the same beneath the surface.

We’ve all heard the advice to wash our hands, avoid touching our faces, and clean our smartphones if we want to avoid catching and spreading coronavirus or other bugs. Mark Rober uses some UV-reactive powder to demonstrate why that’s so important, and shows just how much stuff we touch and leave our germs on.

Beyond the Brick’s Joshua Hanlon met up with builder Carter Baldwin at Philly Brick Fest to check out the section dedicated to glow-in-the-dark creations. Seeing these constructions under black light gives a whole new dimension to LEGO that we never knew existed.