LED back to nature...

I saw this delightful story on the BBC News site today. It discusses the fact that the technology used to create LED displays is strikingly similar to the way that the African swallowtail butterfly's wings present their color. My understanding of science is not very sharp so I will let the BBC describe the details of it all.

The LED developed at MIT used a two-dimensional (2D) photonic crystal - a triangular lattice of holes etched into the LED's upper cladding layer - to enhance the extraction of light.

And layered structures called Bragg reflectors were used to control the emission direction. These high emission devices potentially offer a huge step up in performance over standard types.

Pete Vukusic and Ian Hooper at Exeter have now shown that swallowtail butterflies evolved an identical method for signalling to each other in the wild.

I will add my own thought here, though. Something that I find so problematic when people complain that technology is "the devil" or however they are pitching it these days. While this LED/butterfly story has a very striking message, it is also not entirely unheard of in the past. I mean the technology we use to build houses and bridges and other forms of construction existed in nature in some form far before we ever stepped foot on land. And now something that seems so far from nature...an artificial light source...actually has precedent in a little butterfly. Wild, isn't it? So maybe we should stop running from technology and consider that we are simply extensions of that butterfly and the things we create are not abhorrent outcasts of the natural world, but our wings (okay that is a little cheesy, but I like the concept so just swallow it and shut up...).