The Beetle That Thought It Was A Precious Stone

circletimessquare writes "Queensland, Australia is well-known as one of the most important sources for opal in the world. Apparently Queensland has another untapped source of opal recently discovered in its backyard, except this source is not the providence of geology, but biology. A native weevil of Queensland grows opal on it's back shell! Implications for research into nanotechnology, biotechnology, and photonic computing are implied in the article. The journal Nature is publishing the more rigorous scientific write-up of the findings."

Comments

Biotech

[Godeke]

To paraphrase The Graduate, "In one word - biotech. The future, my boy, is biotech." Almost everything that is promised by nanotech devices will be inspired by, copied from or created out of biotech research. "Classic nano-tech" (the use of bulky, expensive machines to affect the nano-world) doesn't scale. Great for looking at nano stuff, but not for making it.

There are already rumblings that some of the computer components in the fairly near future will be created by organic chemical processes depositing layers at accuracies that classic nano-tech might have achieved, but at a *scale* that makes it useful. A recent "IEEE Computer Magazine" had an article on using viruses to create transistor junctions. Even if this *particular* road dead ends, it seems impossible that organic nanotech won't be the preferred approach to making all things tiny and intricate, especially once we fall below the scale that chip masks are useful.

Nature Better Than Humans at Some Things

[chia_monkey]

It kills me to see how people can be so surprised that nature is capable of producing such incredible things. When there is a new discovery of a naturally occuring disease cure in the Brazillian rain forest people go nuts. How about the fact spider's silk is stronger than kevlar? We've got plants that produce wonder cures. Animals that perform wondrous feats like this beetle that can make gems. And yet we humans still spend billions trying to "discover" new drugs or ways to manufacture crystals. We seriously need to look more at what nature has to offer and mimic that. It's more natural, it's been proven effective over thousands of years, and it will probably cost less.

Re:Nature Better Than Humans at Some Things

[Vellmont]

We've got plants that produce wonder cures. And yet we humans still spend billions trying to "discover" new drugs

I'm not really sure what you're getting at. It costs billions of dollars to screen the huge number of naturallly occuring substances in plants (irrational drug design). And it costs billions to figure out the shape of a receptor, and design a drug to fit into that receptor (rational drug design).

The "naturally occuring disease cure" is just an accident. "nature" (whatever that means) wasn't trying to produce a cure, it's just that living things are very good at producing vast numbers of different organic chemicals, of which a percentage are going to be usefull drugs. Humans are the ones most responsible for finding these cures, not "nature" (if you can even really seperate the two concepts).

Plus it is patentable

[isn't my name]

No, the reason that people like to be able to manufacture en masse is because it is cheaper.

You can patent a process for producing things, but you can't patent a plant--though, unfortunately, in some locales you can patent the plant's genome.

A wonderdrug like penicillin, that comes from naturally occurring processes, is not patentable, so you can't make money on it. An antibiotic produced via chemical, bioengineered, or nanoprocesses is patentable.

So, the only financial incentive for investigating new naturally occuring drugs in nature is simply to identify them, figure out their molecular structure and determine how to produce them because that you can patent and that you can make money on.

It's called camouflage.

[slittle]

Uh, the parent should be +1 Funny not +1 Insightful.

Just like oil, gold, diamands and whatever else are everywhere, so is Opal. It's just easier to get at in some places than others (see also: War on Iraq II :)

And where a certain feature (colour, texture, critter, etc) is more naturally abundant in whatever form, the local wildlife will evolve to emulate it to avoid getting eaten.

So you have reptiles that look like tree bark, butterflies that look like snake eyes, and bugs that look like expensive rocks.