Hairy Tarantulas and Display Technology

Poecilotheria metallica-Wikipedia February 2016

Here is something fascinating, or perhaps fascinatingly terrifying — depending on your level of arachnophobia.

We ran across this article on tarantulas and how their unique hair structures, called nanostructures, create a brilliant blue color without using pigmentation. These various sponge-like photonic nanostructures come in different shapes and layered patterns to reflect light in the blue spectrum — in some cases amazingly bright “get-the-sunglasses-out” cobalt blue.

Isn’t nature great?

Of course the next thought is how finding a way to recreate these nanostructures in a laboratory could help develop new, energy-saving, wide-angle color displays.

Nature teaches us, once again, that you can’t really improve on what it has spent millions of evolutionary years developing. But if we are lucky, and industrious, we can find ways to copy its fascinatingly intelligent design.

You can read the article here, and share your thoughts on displays, optoelectronics technology, or fear of spiders below.