[extropy-chat] Opals to opals

[Kevin Freels]

One thing that article stated was, "It's not surprising they are finding this kind of color, but they are the first to describe how the color is working by getting into the physics and structure of it," 

According to the article, they found this speciment in the museum, noticed the really neat colors and thought something like, "Hey, let's see what it looks like under an electron microscope!" 

It suddenly came to mind just how many things in our natural environment have not even been looked at under a traditional microscope, let alone and electron microscope or STM. Could it be that many of the MNT "parts" necessary for making an assembler already exist somewhere out there in various places just waiting for someone to stumble onto them and bring them into one place? 

I can see it now:
22 parts protein from rat urine bacteria excretion
84 parts carbon from the shell of a beetle
16 parts carbon from the slime of cyanobacteria
Stir into a soup, heat to 1600 degrees and it will self-assemble.......

(OK, so maybe it won't be THAT easy! lol)

Kevin Freels





  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Avatar Polymorph 
  To: extropy-chat 
  Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 10:00 PM
  Subject: [extropy-chat] Opals to opals


  http://nanotechweb.org/articles/news/2/12/13/1

  Beetle perfects artificial opal growth 
  22 December 2003 

  Researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, have discovered what they say is the first example of an opal-type photonic crystal structure in an animal. The intricate three-dimensional structure occurs in a small beetle just a few centimetres long. If the beetle's self-assembly process can be emulated, the team says it could lead to a simpler and cheaper way of producing artificial opals (Nature 426 786).

  "The interesting thing is that this has been found in a living organism," said researcher Andrew Parker. "This means that the beetle must have cells that are making the structure, which gives us something to copy. There is a whole manufacturing process going on which starts with a series of chemicals and ends with a perfect opal structure." 

  The opal-making animal is the weevil Pachyrhynchus argus, a small beetle found in forests in north-eastern Australia. Its body appears a metallic green colour from all angles thanks to a photonic crystal structure that resembles opal. 

  The vivid colour comes courtesy of thin, flat scales which occur in patches over the beetle's body. The scales consist of an outer shell and an inner structure that contains layers of 250 nm diameter transparent spheres. 

  "The spheres are arranged in hexagonal-close packing order," explained Parker. "The scales contain the opal structure. There are tens of layers packed on top of each other in a single scale." 

  The scales produce the green colour by thin-film reflection. "Because we have stacks of spheres instead of flat layers, we have a three-dimensional structure where you can effectively form layers in many directions," he said. "The reflections from each of these layers are superimposed and you get a colour-averaging effect which appears green."

  About the author

  Jacqueline Hewett is an award-winning news reporter on Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine.



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