Sunday, August 15, 2010

Butterflies Being Used As Bomb/Chemical/Disease Detectors

The Blue Morpho Butterfly Zirland via wikimedia

DARPA And GE Look To Butterfly Wings for Better Chemical Sensors -- Popular Science

Researchers at GE Global Research are working with DARPA funding to tap butterfly tech to make a new breed of sensors that could detect everything from explosives, to chemical attacks, to disease biomarkers on a person's breath.

The research team discovered a few years ago that the scales on Morphos butterfly wings have extremely fine-tuned sensing abilities that can pick molecules out of the atmospheric noise. Nano-level structures underneath the colorful scales on the butterflies' wings react to different vapors, changing the spectral reflectivity of the wings depending on what they are exposed to.

Read more ....

My Comment: What will they think of next?

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