Science: Light of Life

Will farms ever move indoors? If the world's burgeoning population runs short of food, they may have to, and crops may be harvested in great windowless greenhouses, shut off from natural light. Scientists from Sylvania Electric Products Inc. are already preparing a substitute sun. Last week their laboratory at Danvers, Mass., was lit by a new fluorescent tube, its spectrum trimmed to a lavender glow that to plants is the light of life.

Plants that grow in the open waste a large part of the sunlight that hits them. Their leaves look green because they reflect most of the green and...

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