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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."
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.
Sig under construction since 1998.
...in Montana we have diamond-backed rattlesnakes.
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.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
This beetle imitates opals by stacking layers of hexagonally aligned nanospheres (250 nm in diameter) to reflect one wavelength (color). If I'm not mistaken that's a lot like those butterflies that have scales sized in the same range of hundreds of nanometers to appear blue without synthetizing any colored substance.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Opals are actually just a mixture of tiny silica spheres and 3-10% water... "nanospeheres" are a defining characteristic of an opal; it's not a single crystal like many other types of gems. interesting reference
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
There is an entire field of research on this approach to color and photonic manipulation in biology (I first heard of this around 1980). Structural colors refer to coloration created not by dyes or pigments, but by microstructural features of the physical surface. The best example of this is the morpho butterfly . Many iridescent creatures get their colors from structural colors. Some of the darkest blacks are also structural.
The transparency of jelly-fish is also structural -- the surface of the jellyfish has nanoscopic fingers (much smaller than a wavelength of light) that create a smooth transition between the high-index-refraction of the jellyfish and the low index of refraction of the water. The result is the ultimate in anti-reflection coatings and a much more transparent jelly fish.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
Make Your Own Gold Mine