Beetle Naturally Builds Photonic Crystals

esocid writes "Impeding the dream of ultrafast optical computers, we've been unable to build an ideal 'photonic crystal' to manipulate visible light, until now. University of Utah chemists have discovered that nature already has designed photonic crystals with the ideal, diamond-like structure: They are found in the shimmering, iridescent green scales of a beetle from Brazil. The beetle is an inch-long weevil named Lamprocyphus augustus. Bartl and Galusha now are trying to design a synthetic version of the beetle's photonic crystals, using scale material as a mold to make the crystals from a transparent semiconductor. The scales can't be used in technological devices because they are made of fingernail-like chitin, which is not stable enough for long-term use, is not semiconducting and doesn't bend light adequately. Ideal photonic crystals could be used to amplify light and thus make solar cells more efficient, to capture light that would catalyze chemical reactions, and to generate tiny laser beams that would serve as light sources on optical chips."

Comments

Re:Contradiction.

[knarfling]

Not really. According to the article, it is the structure that is ideal, not the actual beetle scales. The real breakthrough is that the structure can be found in or created from different materials than diamonds. In this case, the structure is made by nature from fingernail like material, not something you normally associate with crystals.

Having said all that, it is a bit of a disappointment that they have not even created a man-made structure, only that they have confirmed that the structure found naturally on the beetles is the ideal crystal structure.

Re:Why Nature wins

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

But something like this has absolutely no reason to develop.

Just because you can't see the advantage in some feature doesn't mean that there isn't one. In addition, it was my understanding that it's possible for new features to appear and get "carried along" so long as they're not too detrimental to the organism's survival and procreation. They may or may not turn out to be useful later on.

Re:Why Nature wins

[Sangui]

But where was the cow/horse/whatever like animal that was so reproductively successful because its nose was genetically predisposed to be .1 inches longer than the others? A breed of Finch on the Galapagos Islands. One one of the islands all of the Finches beaks are 1/3 of an inch longer than all the other islands because the food is slightly deeper in the ground on that island.

Re:Why Nature wins

[Nasajin]

The logic in this statement is totally lacking, as people just now discovered the value of these crystals. It should be obvious that I do not believe that the crystals have been the reason for the animals success up to now; that is why my statement is not targeting the historical development of the beetles, and instead speaks in the present tense about the current interest in the crystals. There's no point in launching into the fundamentals of Darwinian evolutionary theory in /. - it's been done a thousand times before - but if you can't understand my point and want me to elaborate, I would say that the crystals have, until now, not prevented the genetic meme from reproducing, and it is now possibly increasing their reproductive rates due to the fact that another species is interested in keeping that genetic sequence alive. Conceptually, it's no different than any other mutualistic symbiotic relationship extant in nature. The fundamental point here being that simply because human beings have become involved doesn't mean that evolutionary principles do not apply, and I was making that point to the parent post which was implying that evolutionary theory wasn't applicable in this situation. Also, the term you're looking for isn't 'psychic evolution', it's 'deterministic evolution', and is in either way a moot point as it is not what I was attempting to describe.

Re:Why Nature wins

[Grym]

According to the theory of evolution, everything develops because it randomly mutates and gives an individual some sort of reproductive advantage that increases its chances of reproducing and passing the trait along.

No. See, your problem stems from your lack of understanding of what evolution is and what its implications are. You are viewing evolution as a type of applied engineering where stepwise improvements lead to new features and, eventually, the next species. This is not the case at all. Evolution is far more basic than that. It is simply population genetics over time. That's it; nothing more, nothing less. And yet, when we look at it this way instead of the popular misconception of evolution, we notice some very profound things:

• Most beneficial mutations in stable, numerous populations are lost. Why? They're simply drowned out in the noise. Unless a mutation offers a significant selective advantage for the population, it is far more likely than not to simply get fixed out, or lost.
• On the same note, very small populations can be drastically affected by sample size error, leading to the unwarranted propagation of "bad" genes. This is usually called random drift, but it's really just the Law of Small numbers of statistics. The typical way in which this is demonstrated is through the founder effect, but it also has implications for speciation as well, because it almost guarantees that a newly divergent species will undergo sample size error.

But this being slashdot ill probably get flamed for criticizing evolution and defending intelligent design.

Evolution is real. In fact, given the phenomenological way in which evolution is described, it can't be disputed. Those who attempt to de-legitimize or disprove evolution do so out of their own ignorance. Don't expect any sympathy.

-Grym