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.

Re:That's nothing...

[NanoGator]

"...in Montana we have diamond-backed rattlesnakes."

I can't wait to find a tit mouse.

Gold Bugs

[Colymbosathon ecplec]

I remember reading an article about bugs sweating gold: "Exactly what happened to cause Alaska's placer-building bugs to build up a gold molecule at a time isn't certain. Grossly oversimplified---and I certainly hope no chemist reads this---the metabolic products exuded by the bacteria interact with compounds in the environment virtually an electron at a time. So to speak, the bugs sweat solid gold. Others think the process may have had another purpose. British chemist Steven Mann speculates that the bacteria could be using "gold complexes...as terminal electron acceptors. If so, then this would be a novel form of energy transduction in anaerobic respiration"---that is, the gold buildup was an important part of the bacteria's life processes, not just a waste product like the crust of salt on an athlete's drying skin." Source

Make Your Own Gold Mine