Science Happening Now

Butterfly Wings Inspire Light-Manipulating Surface For Medical Implants: Inspired by tiny nanostructures on transparent butterfly wings, engineers have developed a synthetic analogue for eye implants that makes them more effective and long lasting – Sections of the wings of a longtail glasswing butterfly are almost perfectly transparent. Three years ago, Caltech postdoctoral researcher Radwanul Hasan Siddique – at the time working on a dissertation involving a glasswing species at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany – discovered the reason why: the see-through sections of the wings are coated in tiny pillars, each about 100 nanometers in diameter and spaced about 150 nanometers apart. The size of these pillars – 50 to 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair – gives them unusual optical properties.