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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."
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
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.
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
Probably. A corporate can sue another corporate.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
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".
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.
The purpose of patents (or at least the original purpose) was to put information in the public domain. No one (human) knew about these special lenses before, so it was not in the public domain. Since these scientists did the work (and spent the money) necessary to get this into the public domain, they deserve a patent.
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.
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