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Birds display a rainbow palette of colors, many of which come from special arrangements of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our skin. Researchers at the University of Akron have developed a safe and stable pigment based on the melanin structures. 
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Screens on even the newest phones and tablets can be hard to read outside in bright sunlight. Inspired by the nanostructures found on moth eyes, researchers led by Shin-Tson Wu of the University of Central Florida have developed a new antireflection film that could keep people from having to run to the shade to look at their mobile devices. The antireflection film exhibits a surface reflection of just 0.23 percent, much lower than the surface reflection of usual phones of 4.4 percent.
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"Beating its tiny wings up to 80 times a second a hummingbird will dart from flower to flower, its iridescent plumage dazzling in the tropical sun. But these busy birds are con artists. Their feathers are pigment-free, the colours the product of microscopic structures that refract sunlight like a prism, spraying out its reds, blues and greens."
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"We studied a novel photoanode structure inspired by butterfly wing scales with potential application on dye-sensitized solar cell in this paper. Quasi-honeycomb like structure (QHS), shallow concavities structure (SCS), and cross-ribbing structure (CRS) were synthesized onto a fluorine-doped tin-oxide-coated glass substrate using butterfly wings as biotemplates separately."
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Butterfly wings have inspired the design of a tiny crystal that could make telecommunications faster.
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Researchers from Aalto University and the University of Helsinki are developing nanostructures in which chlorophylls are bound to synthetic materials.
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The rainbow peacock spider (Maratus robinsoni) showcases an intense rainbow iridescent signal in males’ courtship displays to females. The intense rainbow iridescence emerges from specialized abdominal scales on the spiders. These scales combine an airfoil-like microscopic 3D contour with nanoscale diffraction grating structures on the surface that enables separation and isolation of light into its component wavelengths. Inspiration from these super iridescent spider scales can be used to overcome current limitations in spectral manipulation, and to reduce the size of optical spectrometers for applications where fine-scale spectral resolution is required in a very small package, notably instruments on space missions, or wearable chemical detection systems.
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"Bright colors in the natural world often result from tiny structures in feathers or wings that change the way light behaves when it’s reflected. This structural color is responsible for the vivid hues of birds and butterflies. Artificially harnessing this effect could allow us to engineer new materials for applications such as solar cells and chameleon-like adaptive camouflage. Inspired by the deep blue coloration of a native North American bird, Stellar’s jay, a team at Nagoya University reproduced the color in their lab, giving rise to a new type of artificial pigment. “The Stellar’s jay’s feathers provide an excellent example of angle-independent structural color,” says Yukikazu Takeoka, “This color is enhanced by dark materials, which in this case can be attributed to black melanin particles in the feathers.”
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By mimicking the design of a firefly's light-emitting organ, researchers built an LED that shines 55 percent brighter.
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"The Mirasol display technology (developed by Qualcomm) is based on biomimetics - that is, technology that imitates nature. The natural phenomenon that makes a butterfly’s wings or a peacock’s feathers shimmer and give off their rich, striking colors is the same exact quality that drives how Mirasol displays generate color. How do butterflies and peacocks do it? Through microscopic structures on their wings and feathers they are each able to create truly vivid colors simply by causing light to interfere with itself. This "interference" is the reason the term "interferometric" comes into play."
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By mimicking microscopic structures in the wings of a butterfly, an international research team has developed a device smaller than the width of a human hair that could make optical communication faster and more secure.
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