“I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans,” Dawson says, “some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process.”
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Actually a very cool article, thanks for the share
The final quote that you *helpfully added in is great.
I once read an offhand remark online that said effectively “if Dark matter was real and dark energy was real, we could observe that energy being used by life but we don’t”
Strikingly astute observation imo.
Edit: they went on to extrapolate that they don’t believe it is possible to harvest energy from quantum vacuum fluctuations for the same reason. Something alive would have done it already
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Nature is wild. We have truly alien creatures on earth!
Eyes of Sauron!
To be clear, it’s not that they shoot laser beams from their feathers as some sort of mating ritual or defense mechanism (which, honestly, is probably how I would have used my own laser feathers, if I had them), but that there are strikingly identical nano structures that can reflect back a little bit of laser light, under laboratory conditions:
After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers’ eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths.
