Natures wonders: biomimetics;low reflection screens (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, July 26, 2017, 19:55 (2675 days ago) @ David Turell

Moth eyes show us how. At night the moonlight does not reflect from their eyes, perhaps as a developed protection from being spotted by predators:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/learning-from-nature-moth-eyes-inspire-nonre...

"It is a summer night, and the moths are all aflutter. Despite being drenched in moonlight, their eyes do not reflect it—and soon the same principle could help you see your cell-phone screen in bright sunlight.

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"When light moves from one medium to another, it bends and changes speed as the result of differences in a material property called refractive index. If the difference is sharp—as when light moving through air suddenly hits a pane of glass—much of the light is reflected. But a moth’s eye is coated with tiny, uniform bumps that gradually bend (or refract) incoming light. The light waves interfere with one another and cancel one another out, rendering the eyes dark.

"Wu and his colleagues at National Taiwan University created a silicon dioxide mold that resembles a moth’s eye surface and used it to produce a hard, dimpled coating on a flexible sheet. Although these dimples are concave rather than convex such as those on the moth’s eye, they prevent glare in the same way. In tests, the material resulted in less than 1 percent reflectance."

Comment: Nature is always smarter than we are. And these inventions all occurred by chance through evolution! No way!