There is a story behind nearly everything we think and do. Here some words related to our newest paper (just published!):

I have always loved iridescence and structural colours. Could watch rainbows, soap bubbles, oil films on water, opals, and CDs/DVDs/holograms for hours - and do. These brilliant colours make me happy. And how astonished I was when I heard that some fruits, some plant leaves, some viruses, and many many animals have such iridescent colours. When I first saw the iridescent blue/green Selaginella fern (see the image (c) by Mr. Foozi Saad) in the rainforest estate of my friend Dato' Henry Barlow here in peninsular Malaysia, I moved the fern in my hands for hours, admiring the change of colours from green to blue and back to green. So nice. And a very common plant in the Malaysian rainforest!

The magic about such structural colours is that - actually - they are no colours in the sense of body colours. When you grind them, they become transparent dust. It is their structures which make - via playing with the light - these beautiful effects. Small structures, just a tiny fraction of the diameter of one of your hairs. Some tens or hundreds of nanometers. Nice, hmm? So, what we learn from this, apart from beauty: we can colour objects by structuring them. We can make the coloured materials responsive to certain signals by making the structures respond to certain signals (e.g. swelling in water, swelling when certain disease factors attach, etc). We can make colours without using toxic chemicals. We can make colours reactive. We can make colours just for the bees when it rains, and for bees and people when the sun shines. Wow! And this is just colours. There is much more we can learn from Nature. On how to make things. On how to make things better than we currently do. On how to do things sustainably. Let us learn, together! And then, make things differently. And I am thinking not just about things things, but generally ways of managing resources, thinking about nature, dealing with education and interdisciplinarity.

Diah S.Z.M., Karman S.B. and Gebeshuber I.C. (2014) “Nanostructural Colouration in Malaysian Plants: Lessons for Biomimetics and Biomaterials”, Journal of Nanomaterials, 878409(15pp) link to paper (PDF, HTML, ePUB)