“I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans,” Dawson says, “some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process.”
“I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans,” Dawson says, “some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process.”
The feathers actually work as photonic crystals with regularly spaced melanin rods that create a “cavity” where light bounces back and forth until it exits as coherent laser light - nature basically invented distributed feedback lasers millons of years before we did!