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It's all in the scales. Credit: P. Vukusic, University of Exeter
Thursday, January 18th, 2007--
Covered from head to toe in white microscopic scales, the Cyphochilus beetle may be the fairest of them all. For the first time scientists looked inside the beetle's scales to catch a glimpse of what makes this unusual insect so white. The results were published in the journal Science this week.
On the whiteness and brightness scale—and such a scale exists—this beetle outshines milk and teeth. Paper with the same brilliance and brightness is 25 times thicker than the beetle’s white-producing scales, which are about ten times thinner than a human hair.
So how do these beetles do it? It’s all in the scales, literally. You can think of them like pillows, says Peter Vukusic, a lecturer at the University of Exeter in the UK and co-author of the paper. Scales have a shell, just like a pillowcase. Inside the pillowcase, the scale is filled with chitin—a material equivalent to our fingernails. But the key to whiteness is how the chitin fibers are arranged: randomly.
The color white is produced by scattering all wavelengths of light equally; and to get even scattering, you need a random structure. “If you have a structure that is regular, it doesn’t scatter all the wavelengths equally,” says Vukusic. “The more random the better.” (Learn more at the listening station.)
Vukusic and his colleagues also found air pockets between fibers of cuticle. “The closer you put these scattering centers to each other, the less efficient the white light scattering becomes.” He believes this is an idea that might be borrowed for our own production of white.
“It would appear a lot of different technologies and industries would like to be able to manipulate color so they get a particular shade of white or a particular brilliance of white.” But we're a long way from ultra thin paint or beetle-inspired teeth whitening strips, Vukusic cautions.
Vukusic says: “The stuff that really rocks my boat is discovering this thing and trying to understand how it does this, and for this particular system we think we’ve cracked that nutshell.”
--Flora Lichtman
Peter Vukusic
School of Physics
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK
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