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Fireflies Bring Us Brighter LEDs
Zothecula writes "Fireflies have helped an international team of scientists get over 50 percent more light out of existing LED bulbs. It was discovered that in the Photuris genus of firefly, scales in the insect's exoskeleton possess optical qualities that boost the amount of bioluminescence that can shine through. Those same qualities were found to dramatically increase the light output of an LED bulb."
should sue them on behalf of his father.
Mod as flamebait
No, if it was intelligent design, all fireflies would have this. Since it appears only one strain of fireflies does this, it points to evolution.
Be seeing you...
The linked article is just a paraphrase of this press release, which has more details.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Perhaps evolution itself is intelligent design.
So thanks to fireflies I can have even brighter, more obnoxious headlights on my car.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Perhaps evolution itself is intelligent design.
None of this would explain your existence.
Now that the fireflies are popular, they will cease to exist as they will surely be axed by Fox.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
If I understand what was discovered in TFA (and press release noted by Trepidity), the etched scales reduce the internal reflections of the produced light which result in some of the produced light being lost in the structure of the LED and lens.
Does anybody know how much light is actually lost within the LED and lens? The article mentions that the extrated light is increased by 55% which implies that at least a third of the light produced by an LED is lost within the structure - would this be correct?
I would presume that this loss would be influenced by the shape of the LED lens - correct? I seem to remember that pin through hole LEDs are designed with the emitter at the focus of the curved lens to minimize reflected losses BUT this could be a huge advantage for SMT chip LEDs which tyically just have a flat surface for the lens.
Are there other applications in which this can be used as I would think that this could be useful in other applications? I would guess that adding the triangular "roof" structure would make it difficult to focus/direct the light produced by the LED. This would mean that the typical power dispersion patter of a typical LED would be evened out and the light output would be difficult to focus - correct?
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
In other words, YOU think you know what the alleged designer had in mind, and since the result is not in your mind, therefore said designer doesn't exist. On the the other hand, if the design point of this bug was to exist in diverse forms, then mission accomplished. There now, I've evolved my design-understanding to fit the facts. Now it's your turn to design the evolution of your thought-processes accordingly.
The OP doesn't say either way, but it would be interesting to see if the company publishing their findings has applied for a patent on this design.
I'm pretty sure I've seen others succeed in this regard (for example pharmaceutical companies patenting drugs that occur in nature). Which is interesting, because it means that patent law doesn't allow you to copy from another patent holder, but it does allow you to copy from nature... probably because there is no one there to demand the royalties. Just another illustration to show how the patent system is totally broken.
luminescent design
In other words, YOU think you know what the alleged designer had in mind
No, really it's just Occam's razor. When you can explain observed facts with a simple, elegant, proved-to-death process like evolution through natural selection, bringing an omnipotent designer into the picture to explain away facts is overkill. Might as well claim the Teapot summoned the designer in the first place.
Every end has half a stick.
Evolution is hardly simple compared to (to use the popular atheist pejorative) "goddidit".
Fortunately, Occam's Razor doesn't, and never did, say the slightest thing about what is true, rather only what is pragmatic for use when presented with otherwise-equivalent models.
"No, if it was intelligent design, all fireflies would have this."
What?
Similarly, if cars were designed, they'd all have 8-cylinder engines?
About two months ago Koreans published a similar success plus they found out the surface trick also worked as a good anti-reflective coating:
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-fireflies-korean-team-bright-idea.html
Evolution is hardly simple compared to (to use the popular atheist pejorative) "goddidit".
"Goddidit" in isolation is simple. But then accounting for all the mental hoops one needs to take to create a semi-reasonable model with an omnipotent creator being, it becomes progressively more complex.
Fortunately, Occam's Razor doesn't, and never did, say the slightest thing about what is true, rather only what is pragmatic for use when presented with otherwise-equivalent models.
Of course. When presented with a choice between "this simple process did it", "an unseen creator did it, then put a lot of hints to the contrary in the ground" and more intricate theories like "the Teapot made the creator do that", it's pragmatic to choose the first one. I'm willing to change my mind when evidence that disproves evolution or evidence for intelligent creator or evidence for Teapot surfaces.
Every end has half a stick.
That's... Uh... I... I'd say something snarky in Chinese, but words fail me!
If this characteristics is advantageous to the survival of the species, according to evolution we should be seeing it on more than one strain of fireflies, shouldn't we?
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
Evolution is pretty slow for most species.. This feature might not have existed in any fireflies just 1000 years ago.
Now if you want quick evolution. Going to have to go down the scale to germs and microbes. And they are evolving rapidly which is why we now have things like MSRA killing people. That has evolved in the human lifespan in an observable way.
Most everything else evolves over such long periods of time.. We havent been advanced long enough to have noticed them. Come back in a million years and all fireflies might have this adaptation. If it helps them outbreed those that don't.
Today the evidence for Jesus can be seen in people. In lives changed from being ruined to being fixed, in people serving meals at soup kitchens, in caring for others and in answered prayers of Christians.
(The Bible says that the world was made through Jesus hence intelligent creator.)
And in raped altarboys, and throughout Westboro Baptist Church.
You can't be selective with the data, and simply through away the data points you don't like. Well, you can, as you've clearly lost all your critical thinking skills.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
(The Bible says that the world was made through Jesus hence intelligent creator.)
uh ... no it doesn't. Jesus was the (according to Christianity anyway) savior of mankind. God was the creator of everything. Although, granted all three (God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit) are "God", and simply make up different aspects of the Trinity as a "whole".
Intelligent design and evolution are made to explain completely separate things.
Evolution only explains the diversity and change in populations but does not explain where it started. Evolution assumes some sort of starting point.
Intelligent design and creationism on the other hand tries to explain the starting point.
You could have intelligent design start life and evolution take over after that.
The primordial soup theory has never been demonstrated in lab (beyond simple amino acids).
You're seriously trying to use "science" and "evidence" to explain your faith?
There is no stronger principle in science than evolution. Because of anti-science fanatics like you, it has more support, evidence, and understanding than any single field of physical science known to man. Do you understand that? The computer you're using has less evidence for it working than evolution. Gravity is absurd compared to the depth of evidence of evolution.
If our understanding of basic science depended on it, you would sooner float off the planet than evolution would cease to be.
I'm glad you're religious if it works for you and your family. Just stay out of politics and science and you'll be fine. The moment you touch that, you become an idiot.
I have no need of the hypothesis that there is a Creator. It explains everything, but predicts nothing.
Click through the links until you find the original abstract.
The paper is about their experiments to understand the emittance of firefly scales. The conclusion is that the scales improve emittance by 55% when replicated on a cheap LED they were using as a test source.
They had no plans on using this for any practical purpose, which isn't surprising given that many optical devices already use this technique, and have for years. You can buy laser-etching solar cell surfacers off the 'web. Google it yourself.
This is simply another excellent example of a team misleading their university's press department by releasing link spammy titles, followed by the press team failing to do their job and apply any due diligence, followed by the blogrolling that occurs when a self-described TV producer reads the same link spam and fails utterly in their duty as well. /. copied it from Giz, who copied it from the press release, and no one bothered to actually look at the paper in question.
Nothing to see here folks, move along
"Now that the fireflies are popular, they will cease to exist as they will surely be axed by Fox."
The religious Right cannot endorse something that comes from Luciferin. Lighting your home with that and you'll go straight to Hell.
In 1940, Robert A. Heinlein (writing under the pseudonym of Lyle Monroe) published a story called "Let There Be Light" where the firefly's bioluminosity whas studied leading to the development of "light panels", kinda-sorta predicting LEDs. It's a nice development that now the firefly is being studied to improve those LEDs. Though the mechanism is totally different of course.
The story is apparently in the public domain now, available here.
But it was intelligent design to fool those who don't have blind faith that there is a intelligent design and not the evolution! DUCH!
(just joking of someone didn't get it. Really, there are so blind believers that would take that seriously)
And god is simple? The cognitive capacity alone needed to create the reality we're in and to listen to all those prayers, to monitor and judge all those lives, I wouldn't call that simple at all.
Evolution, at its core, is simple: individuals reproduce in some way, there are traits that individuals inherit from their parent(s), (some of) those traits have an influence on an individual's reproduction succes. That is enough to make (natural) selection inevitable. Mechanisms for recombining traits produce individuals with combinations of traits that didn't exist before. There you have it: evolution. Sexual reproduction and the exchange of DNA between bacteria are such mechanisms. Because by selection and recombination alone some traits will die out, for long term sustainability mechanisms are needed that produce new traits: mutations.
It's just math, really. Make a computer program with a simulation of these mechanisms, something quite simple will do, and you can see evolution happening before your eyes. You can to some extent see complexity emerge if it fits the requirements imposed by the environment better than less complex individuals. If the mechanisms used to code for variation are themselves subject to evolution (and as they are part of the package we call life I don't see why they should be excluded) then from a simple start more sophisticated mechanisms can evolve. For life to become more and more complex all that's needed is that occasionally a trait that adds complexity also enhances reproduction succes. The only thing that might put an upper limit to complexity would be a reduced redproduction succes.
Don't mistake the complexity of the result of evolution for the complexity of evolution itself. Evolution itself is a surprisingly simple principle.
I'm pretty confident that mathematicians could turn what I described as evolution in the second paragraph of this post into a formal proof that evolution is inevitable if those few conditions are met. It should then be trivial to show life as we know it satisfies those conditions. That doesn't tell us how life started, but if mechanisms that satisfy the conditions are discovered that are simple enough to spontaneously appear occasionally, and if a tendency to increased complexity can be shown to be a likely part of evolution (for instance when individuals need to compete for scarce resources), then the question shifts from "how could life evolve" to "how could life not evolve".
You do know that cars designs evolve with a process of incremental changes? 8cyl designs lost in the evolutionary battle due to cost and fuel economy.
Didn't expect car analogies to work for evolution, but thank you for prompting it!
And that's if you conceniently forget that Jewish religion was previously polytheistic, and Yhwh was just but one of several annoying traits personified. In his case, war.
Brighter LEDs have their purpose, but I desperately request that we invent, or use some dimmer LEDs for some home user products.
While I find it very convenient that my PC has the capability to serve as emergency lighting should my overhead lamps fail, it's not so great for a piercing blue LED to light up my room when watching a movie or playing a game. Of course, a 'fix' for that is just some electrical tape away (or when I finally get around to it, some diagonal cutters)
The real "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT" LED annoyance for me is when they are in vehicles. Nothing like a subdued glow from your gauges at night and a night-vision destroying permanently-on LED indicator that the PASSENGER AIRBAG IS ON. My god... how would I ever survive without knowing that this always-on feature was on without that bright LED indicator to keep me informed. (Technically it could be off, but you need to perform special modifications to the car to disable the passenger airbag, why the hell couldn't the indicator turn ON when it was disabled...)
"over 50 percent more light out of existing LED bulbs"
This is far easier than getting 50 percent more light out of LED bulbs that don't exist.
Are you sure? I thought quantum mechanics had more evidence. At least that's what I've heard and read over and over, but I guess I've never sat down to find out if that was true.
Is already blinding enough. I really do not know what the designers were thinking, putting an LED equivalent of a 60 watt bulb for the power indicator. You could read my the light of the stupid thing.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Fireflies Bring Us Brighter LEDs
A band of ingenious fireflies, in a fit of magnanimity, decided to bestow upon us mere mortals the gift of their superior LED technology. Down they flew from their mountaintop aerie, each carrying a pair of Super-Ultra-Bright (tm) Firefly-made LEDs in their little firefly feet, and upon reaching Belgium, they lightly dropped them into the hands of grateful research scientists.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
They must have Leonardo's Workshop built.
http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Leonardo's_Workshop
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
What assumptions and additional actors does evolution add? In what universe are they not simple compared with "First we need to have an invisible, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal being"?
If cars were designed by an all knowing, all powerful, god then no I wouldn't expect them to all have 8-cylinder engines. I would expect them all to use the optimal design for the niche they are in. If there was a component that was better than some other component in every way then yes I would expect the better component to always be used.
Of course the beauty of intelligent design is that nothing can ever run counter to it and hence it can never be shown false (it also doesn't provide any useful predictions for that same reason), so we can just say "god wants diversity in his cars" and problem averted.
likewise, cars were created by an intelligent designer, AND also evolved.
not really sure why the 2 need to be mutually exclusive when talking about the more general topic of 'everything' , but they don't need to be mutually exclusive when talking about something specific such as cars?
Yes, God created everything. yes, things evolve. christians cannot (and smart ones, do not) ignore science. Christianity and Science can easily live together, they don't, and never have been contradictory. Thats why arguments about them lead nowhere. there's nothing to argue about. the only reason arguments happen is ignorance on both sides.
I didn't read through to the full article, of course; this is Slashdot. I'll do that in a minute. But the SEM image they showed in the first link was not scales; it was just the surface of the exoskeleton. Scales are quite different.
Can you cite the verse that mentions "Trinity" for me?
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
And that ';logic' is why there can be no debate with you people. You use bad logic, logical fallacies and refuse to hold your view to the same tests as you want evolutionary scientist to have.
There is no evidence of any designer; however creations talk about top down.
You create an absurd argument instead of offer evidence.
Science works. Changing the argument instead of showing proof just shows that you belief is factually wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There is no evidence Jesus existed, and you you study the time when the bible was put together, the letters strongly indicate that 'Jesus' is a compilation of people. FYI: at the time people claiming to be Prophets and the son of god was common.
". In lives changed from being ruined to being fixed, "
personal bias.
", in people serving meals at soup kitchens"
Gee, all kindness comes from the religion you happen to believe, what an amazing coincidence.
The fact that similar things have been going on far longer the the belief in God proves you are wrong.
" answered prayers of Christians."
Yeah, that doesn't happen. Provably does not happen.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nope.
Evolution is a bush, not a tree or straight line. It's also slow. IF brightness helps mating, then eventually all fireflies in that area will get them...UNLESS it also makes them easier to be food.
I don't know if with of those are true, just pointing out the two most obvious variables.
And evolution is ongoing, so in 200 years maybe all fireflies will have them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How many Fireflies does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Two.
The trick is getting them into the light bulb.
No brain, no pain.
God created evolution.
There, you can now both be right!
who said anything abou omnipotence ? tye whole creation thing makes more sense if you picture a very advanced but limited designer race of beings, trying out their designs in one big expwrimental terrarium called planet earth.
Read John 1. Speaking of *Jesus* ("the Word"), John says that "All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made."
No, obviously only those fireflies were the chosen ones.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Photuris genus of firefly is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
They don't need to be mutually exclusive. But nothing in evolution needs a creator to work, so why do you think there was one?
Christianity and science can easily live together? How is prayer scientific? Closing your eyes and talking to yourself inside your own head while an invisible, undetectable, mind-reading being grants your wishes is scientific? How about the talking donkey in the Bible? Should that be included in biology textbooks? How about heaven and hell and souls? Where is the science in that? The 'smart' Christians that you speak of just pick and choose the parts of the Bible they want to take as symbolic or literal, depending on what fits in with their current scientific view of the world.
I was kidding about the flamebait guys. Sorry to set fire to the firefly thread with the Intelligent Design comment. Maybe Slashdot should consider a "controlled burn" strategy where certain flame-war topics are brought up on a scheduled basis to protect from uncontrolled fires.
Gently reply
That's a big if. The male peacock's tail most definately is disadvantageous to the species, but it still evolved because it attracts the female peacock. Not having studied this firefly at all I don't know if there is a benefit to the firefly from this adaptation or if it evolved due to a similar reason the peacocks tail did.
Secondly, if it is beneficial to the species, then the species that evolved it first has filled the niche for this type of firefly which doesn't leave room for another species of firefly to evolve it again.
I've still got a couple of '70s era LEDs that:
- have a 1.7Vfd
- have an Imax of 15mA
- are STILL some of the brightest LEDs in my drawer.
How?
Some French guy named "Fresnel". They don't produce more light than the others, they just use it better.
The problem with ID/Creationism is that they don't explain anything at all.
Stop trying to talk sense to the senseless. Don't you understand that no amount of evidence will convince people who regard evidence as suspect when it contradicts their cherrished fucking illusions? Arguing against intelligent design is like showing a dog a diagram of a primary sequence star and expecting it to understand what the fuck you're trying to show it.
If you want the dillusional to grok that their gods are made-up, don't tell them they (or he or she or whatever) is fake, explain to them how the power of random reinforcement and existential bias tend to cause living things subject to the influence of classical and/or operant conditioning to misinterpret events and assign to random events meaning that just isn't there! Let them conclude that the world (and the broader universe) don't actually need "god" or "gods" to exist to operate and appear as they do. Don't try to drag them kicking and screaming out of their fantasy worlds, it won't work, it will just make them resent you and the truth.
Okay?
We can verify gravity in a lab, not evolution.
Today the evidence for Jesus can be seen in people. In lives changed from being ruined to being fixed, in people serving meals at soup kitchens, in caring for others and in answered prayers of Christians.
That's not got much to do with Jesus from what I see. That's people doing things.
Where's Jesus during the rampant abductions, murders and rapes that are going on every day?
Serenity melancholy.
Alas.
So, if that were the case, the Atheism would be guilty of all the crimes committed by atheists in the name of atheism ... right?
Because no true atheist would kill is the reply I usually get, which is the same response you'll get from BenJaminus, right?
The question is, are the millions killed by atheists (USSR, PRoC, etc) outliers as much as Raping priests and the WBC are to Xians.
And for the record, I am not Xian.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yes, that makes vastly more sense. Especially if they are hyper-intelligent pangalactic inter-dimensional beings whose physical manifestation within this universe is mice.
Every end has half a stick.
You'd need to define "in the name of atheism" before that's properly answerable. I don't know of any specifically-atheist tracts that command the killing of others, which includes those which were an influence (at least by lip-service) on the regimes you mention. So I'd argue that those killings were not "in the name of atheism". Of course, altar-boy rape isn't in the bible either, so your point is a valid one.
However, the sub-text behind my previous post was that "the evidence for Jesus can be seen in" none of these things, not the good happenstances, nor the evil ones. Which gets me off the hook as your "if that was the case" does not apply. It was a rather deeply buried though, I do admit.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
This sounds like a "scifi-jihadist" rebut, if you can pardon the paradigm. Bad logic because it doesn't follow your conclusion -- is that your general description for those who disagree with you, or do you reserve the label for religious discussions? Surely the facts of the matter don't depend on my arguments regardless of the inconvenience this causes you .
Science is a method, and the conclusions continue to change over time. And I suppose once everything is "proved", as you envision it, science itself will be obsolete.
The states mentioned did things to religious people, often on trumped up charges or actual violation of state laws against certain religious activities. IT doesn't mean it wasn't sanctioned or didn't happen. Point of fact, Falun Gong of China are highly persecuted today, just because the nature of the religion is anti totalitarian state. Persecuted for religion ... not exactly, but actual in practice .. yes .
A = B
B= C
You can't be for A and against C.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
So how long before we meet the new firefly yeasts? hehe. By the way for hi-tech and research this will be very useful but for common usage we still have to see if the price rate really make it a reality. For funding, research and peer finding please refer to the non-profit Aging Portfolio.