Morgalyn's Journal: Examples of high-emission LEDs discovered in.... Butterflies

The BBC is reporting on a serendipitous discovery that swallowtails living in Africa of the Princeps nireus species use biological structures to signal each other with an uncanny resemblance to the recently (2001) invented high-emission LEDs. From the article: "Unlike the diodes, the butterfly's system clearly doesn't have semiconductor in it and it doesn't produce its own radiative energy," Dr Vukusic told the BBC News website "That makes it doubly efficient in a way.... But the way light is extracted from the butterfly's system is more than an analogy - it's all but identical in design to the LED." The article also includes a nice short description of what makes a high-emission LED tick with a comparison to the biological structures.

Still pending

[Morgalyn]

so my submission, as seen above, is still pending, but that is ok. I've noticed the throughput on science articles tends to be a bit slower than some of the other categories.

I was pretty excited by this article, since I like biomimetics, and this is like reverse biomimetics. I really wish there was more cross-disciplinary research in technology. I think we have a lot to learn from biologists and other life scientists.