clhs sciblog

It was discovered that the nanostructures  that produce some birds’ brightly colored feathers have a structure similar to sponges or beer foam.  Most colors in nature are produced by pigments, but the bright blue color in many birds feathers are produced by nanostructures.  Under a microscope, nanostructures look like sponges or air bubbles.  A team at Yale compared nanostructures to materials that underwent phase changes,  where mixtures of different structures separate from one another and, such as carbon-dioxide bubbles.  They found that the color producing structures in feathers assemble in the same way.  Bubbles of water form in the cell and are replaced with air as the feather grows. Read the full article here.

This is very influential in the field of science.  Scientists are now using this new discovery to make a new generation of optical materials in the lab.  It’s amazing how something like the color in a bird feather is somewhat related to the foam from a can of soda.  It just goes to show how much we don’t know and how much completely different things can be related to each other.

Q4-2