WEBVTT

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First of all, colour doesn't exist
in the outside world:

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it exists only in the minds
of animals with eyes.

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And we still don't fully understand

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how our images of the world
are put together.

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But that's not an issue for nature.

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Nature doesn't need
to understand how things work;

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it just gets on with inventing things
through trial and error, random mutations.

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Now I'm going to talk about
how I came across these two facts,

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and how they led me
to a subject called biomimetics,

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which is learning from nature,

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taking inspiration from nature
to effect our commercial products.

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This all began about 20 years ago,

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working on a group of animals called
seed shrimps or ostracod crustaceans.

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They are fairly obscure animals,
about the size of a tomato seed,

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not very well known, but very, very
common in Australian waters.

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They're well known to produce
bioluminescent light.

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They light up in the dark
when there's no light to reflect,

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and you can find them
on beaches around Sydney at night,

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as you can see in this image here.

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That was well known,

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but I've often quoted that my research
began with a flash of green light,

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green or blue light, and that's true.

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When I was looking at some
preserved ostracods under a microscope,

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I moved them around and started to find
flashes of blue and green light.

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This wasn't known for ostracods,
so I thought, "What's going on here?"

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Also, when I videoed
live animals during courtship,

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they were using these
iridescent flashes of light

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as a courtship display
to attract each other.

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So, I decided to put some ostracods
in electron microscopes

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to find out what's going on.

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Here you can see
the images of a diffraction grating

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on the surface of the hairs

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that are splitting up white light
into its component colours.

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Diffraction gratings are well known
in physics and in commerce.

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They have a number of uses in technology.

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But they weren't known
in ostracods or animals in general.

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Now, the interesting thing here is that,

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because they were being used
as a courtship display,

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they had a function.

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So they'd evolved
to be very, very efficient.

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Nature had been working on these
over millions of years,

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fine-tuning them to be optimal
at doing their job.

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Now I knew what I was looking for,

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I thought, "Where else
do diffraction gratings occur in nature?"

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So I looked at all sorts of animals,

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and found them in a range of things.

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From worms, as you can see here,

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and also on the claws
of, in this case, a galatheid lobster.

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You can see how the colour changes
with change in direction.

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These are the very bright,
metallic-looking colours

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that you find also in hummingbirds
and beetles, for example.

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These are physical structures
just like bones.

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So I thought, "Well, I wonder
if it occurs in fossils too."

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And in fact they did.

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We started to look at fossils.

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I found them
in 45-million-year-old beetles

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that came out of the rocks
just looking like living beetles,

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sparkling with all their metallic colours;

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in 85-million-year-old ammonites
as you can see here.

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You can also see how light is reflecting

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from the different layers
in this reflector.

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The layers, they're about 100th
of a hair's width in size,

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really, really tiny nanostructures, even.

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The oldest were the Burgess Shale fossils,

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508 million years old
from the Cambrian period.

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This got me thinking, "We can take
colour back this far in time,

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but how far can you go here?

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When did colour first begin on earth?"

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That led me to search
for the very first eye that existed.

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It turned out to be a trilobite
that had this very first eye,

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a type that you can see here.

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You can see one of the ridges
on one of the eyes, for example.

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Really, really good eyes in fact,

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they could produce image
just as well as we can today.

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But this animal lived
521 million years ago.

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Before that there was no vision,
so colour didn't matter.

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There was really no such thing as colour,
just wavelengths of light.

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I looked at the animals
that existed at that time.

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The trilobite had really
armoured parts, hard parts,

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and it had a very modern lifestyle.

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It moved very quickly,

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and it had hard parts
to tear animals apart.

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It was a predator.

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It could see animals around it.

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But just before that,
all the animals were soft bodied,

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even the predecessor of the trilobite,

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and they moved around very slowly
on the seafloor just bumping into things.

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They didn't really interact
with each other very well.

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They did have a light sensor.

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The most sophisticated
light sensor of the time

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would have produced
this image of the world.

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This is the best way animals
could have seen their environment

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with such a sensor.

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You can see the direction
where light is coming from,

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so you know where up and down is
in the water column, for example.

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But you can't find
a friend or foe around you.

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You can't identify all the other animals
and see what there is.

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Then perhaps the most dramatic event
in the history of life happened.

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One of those light sensors evolved lenses.

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Suddenly an image was cast
on the back of an eye,

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the very first image on earth,

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which would have looked
something like this.

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You can see all the other
animals around you.

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You can identify what's possibly prey.

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Therefore, selection pressures,
evolutionary pressures,

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start acting on that animal
to evolve swimming parts to get there,

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a hard part to tear it apart,

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and feed on all of those
soft-bodied animals,

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which are essentially
chunks of protein waiting to be eaten.

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It actually triggered
the Cambrian explosion,

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the Big Bang in evolution,

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where all animals
went from being soft bodied,

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like worms and jellyfish,

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into having the whole range of bodies
that you see today,

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the whole range of behaviours.

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Life suddenly became complex.

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Vision was introduced to the world,
and it was here to stay.

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Today, over 95% of animals have eyes,

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and vision is the most powerful
stimulus on earth.

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Everywhere you go,
you leave an image on a retina,

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and, from then onwards,
animals had to be adapted

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and could at any time
be caught by a predator.

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Evolution has led to a design process

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where trillions upon trillions
of strands of DNA are mutating,

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producing endless designs
of new types of colours.

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They've been working on this
over millions of years,

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hundreds of millions of years
to produce optimal colours.

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A designer in commerce
would be lucky to get a year

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to come up with a new colour.

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So, why not just go to nature
and see what they have to offer,

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see if we can copy some of the things?

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Even if we don't understand
how the colours are produced,

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that doesn't matter,

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just simply copy those nanostructures
that's there in nature,

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then you will have the same colours.

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After all, we're working
towards the same goal:

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the effect on the eye.

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So let's go to industry now and ask:

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"What type of colours would you like?"

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"Would you like a very bright colour
that lights up in the dark,

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that even when there's no sunlight,
you can produce light?"

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For example in glow sticks,

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or in certain applications
in farmers' fields,

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where, if a crop is attacked by a virus,

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it lights up at night to tell the farmer
where the attack is.

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That's exactly what we're doing
with bioluminescent chemicals.

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Bioluminescence is where two chemicals
interact in the presence of oxygen

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and produce light as a by-product.

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It's a very efficient light.

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Almost all of the energy
is converted into light,

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very little heat, as opposed
to light bulbs, for example.

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Bioluminescence causes the light
in fireflies or glow worms.

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It's very common in the deep sea,

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where over 90% of all animals
produce bioluminescent lights.

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Would industry like to have
pigments, perhaps?

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These are really common in nature,
for example, in this milk snake here.

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There's a pigment in this case
that produces an orange effect.

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So, what happens here
is the molecule is struck by white light

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with all the different colours
or wavelengths.

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Most of those wavelengths
are eaten up and turned into heat,

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but the energy remaining
in those that aren't eaten up

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is back-reflected or scattered out
into the environment,

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so you see those colours.

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There's another way that nature
can offer pigments to industry.

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That's through chromatophores,
or colour change cells.

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These are cells
that can expand or contract

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and are filled with pigment.

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When they expand,

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they are large enough
to be seen as a pixel,

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and when they contract,
they become invisible.

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This is the way that chameleons
change colour, or cuttlefish or squid.

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You can imagine packing red, blue
and green chromatophores together

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and expanding and contracting those
to produce any colour you want to.

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Now I'm working with Georgia Tech

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to try to produce colour change
surfaces and materials,

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which is great for camouflage
colours, for example.

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We could produce fluorescent colours
for industry as well,

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plenty of those around,

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particularly in parrots,
Australian parrots in particular.

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These are head feathers
from the sulphur-crested cockatoo

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that fluoresce.

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You'll see there's a picture there
showing the yellow pigment

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and then also showing
the fluorescence only.

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What's happening is that
the fluorescence is also yellow

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and is enhancing
the effect of the yellow pigment.

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I found that some yellow feathers
are producing fluorescence

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and others are not.

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In fact, those that
are used for courtship,

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those in areas of the plumage
used to attract a female,

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they've got the fluorescent pigment.

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So it's not just incidental
of a yellow pigment.

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Evolution has acted on this

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to be very, very efficient
at producing the yellow light.

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Fluorescence results from
an effect at the atomic level,

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where white light comes in,
including ultraviolet light.

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Ultraviolet, which we don't see,

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is eaten up and rejected again
in a longer wavelength.

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So some of the high energy
that is contained in ultraviolet light

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is used up when an electron jumps
into an outer shell.

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When the electron immediately
drops down back to its original shell,

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that energy is re-emitted,
but a little is lost as heat,

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so there's less energy,

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which means a longer wavelength
or yellow light, for example.

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So we go from ultraviolet light,
which we don't see,

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to yellow light, which we do.

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Now, this is my favourite subject,

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this is structural colour,
nature's nanotechnology, if you like.

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These are physical structures made
from completely transparent materials.

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It's the architecture at the nanoscale

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that's important in determining
what colour is reflected,

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or what type of light effect
that you can see.

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Here we have the spines
of a sea mouse called Aphrodita

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found around Sydney's beaches.

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It's a strange-looking animal;
it looks like a little iridescent mouse.

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But it's a marine animal,

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and it's covered
in these iridescent spines.

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If you cut through those spines,

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you can see these tiny nanotubes

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that form what's called
a photonic crystal fibre.

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Photonic crystals were only discovered
in physics in the 1980s,

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and they've since been used in all sorts
of technological applications.

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They're going to revolutionize
computers in the future

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with optical chips
instead of electronic chips.

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These types of photonic crystal fibres

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are already used
in the telecommunications industry.

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But we've got designs in nature
that aren't known in physics,

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and we don't fully understand
how it works in physics yet.

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So, let's just copy
what nature's got for now.

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And in fact, I didn't find this one.

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This was the first photonic crystal
found in nature,

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which I found in the year 2000.

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But we'd have saved
ourselves a lot of time

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if we'd started looking at nature earlier.

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Butterflies are really good examples
of photonic crystals.

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A butterfly's wing contains
about a hundred thousand scales

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overlapping like tiles on a roof.

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Each of those scales
are filled with nanostructures

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that interact with light waves
in various ways.

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And you'll see by these next slides -

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we've got electron micrographs
showing the fine details on those scales,

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again about 100th
of a hair's width in size -

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you'll see how those structures change

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almost like the shape
of a building can change,

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but when it's on that nanoscale,
around the wavelength of light in scale,

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then they will change the colour effect.

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So you can see these various
architectures producing different colours,

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and they can change the way
that colour changes.

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As you walk around these scales,

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you can get a change in colour,
or you can get constant colour,

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you can get very bright scales,
or you can get duller examples.

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A good example
of a photonic crystal is opal,

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the gemstone opal as you can see
in this top-left picture there.

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Opal is filled with tiny nanospheres.

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They're close-packed together.

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Light rays come in

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and bounce around inside this structure
and interact with each other

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to produce these iridescent colours.

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But interestingly, I found opal,
in 2005, in a weevil, an animal.

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So, a living thing producing opal.

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Well, opal does have
lots of technological applications

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such as it will appear in computer chips.

00:13:32.511 --> 00:13:35.160
Industry makes it at high energy costs;

00:13:35.180 --> 00:13:37.620
we need high temperatures and pressures.

00:13:37.620 --> 00:13:42.553
But nature, animals, are doing this
at room temperatures and pressures.

00:13:43.221 --> 00:13:45.320
They're magically
mixing together chemicals,

00:13:45.326 --> 00:13:48.835
and out comes this perfect opal,
using very, very low energy.

00:13:48.844 --> 00:13:51.231
So, this is something
we're trying to do at moment.

00:13:51.234 --> 00:13:53.677
We're trying to image these scales
in living weevils

00:13:53.680 --> 00:13:56.430
to work out how they're
making these devices,

00:13:56.457 --> 00:13:59.588
and see if we can copy it
and bring this process to industry.

00:14:02.301 --> 00:14:05.577
Some optical devices in nature
don't produce any colour at all.

00:14:05.582 --> 00:14:06.862
In fact the opposite:

00:14:06.870 --> 00:14:08.960
they prevent any kind of reflections,

00:14:09.062 --> 00:14:11.310
all the light passes through a surface,

00:14:11.310 --> 00:14:14.620
such as I found on the eye
of this 45-million-year-old fly

00:14:14.620 --> 00:14:15.970
preserved in amber.

00:14:15.970 --> 00:14:18.212
This very fine structure
you can just about see

00:14:18.212 --> 00:14:21.200
in this electron micrograph,
these very fine striations.

00:14:21.200 --> 00:14:25.840
When I made this onto a perspex surface,
as you can see in the bottom right,

00:14:25.850 --> 00:14:28.052
in the centre there,
you've got this structure,

00:14:28.052 --> 00:14:30.710
and you can see how the reflections
are being cut down.

00:14:30.710 --> 00:14:34.090
It allows all the light to pass through
instead of being reflected.

00:14:34.096 --> 00:14:35.986
If you put this onto a glass window,

00:14:35.991 --> 00:14:38.393
you'd no longer see
reflections of yourself.

00:14:38.406 --> 00:14:42.963
But put onto solar panels,
we get a 10% increase in energy capture.

00:14:45.532 --> 00:14:46.808
Now, several years ago,

00:14:46.815 --> 00:14:50.413
I started to expand my interest
in biomimetics, in optics or colour,

00:14:50.413 --> 00:14:51.618
into other subjects,

00:14:51.618 --> 00:14:56.208
such as looking at strong materials
in beetles or mantis shrimps,

00:14:56.208 --> 00:14:58.973
looking at glues that work underwater,

00:14:58.973 --> 00:15:03.623
designs of buildings based
on natural animals and plants,

00:15:04.096 --> 00:15:07.334
and also air-conditioning systems,
such as found in termite mounds,

00:15:07.336 --> 00:15:08.546
to put into buildings,

00:15:08.546 --> 00:15:10.079
which require very little power.

00:15:10.738 --> 00:15:13.738
One thing that really grabbed me is water.

00:15:13.738 --> 00:15:16.750
Just quickly, here's an example
of a Namibian beetle,

00:15:16.750 --> 00:15:18.148
where I found a structure

00:15:18.152 --> 00:15:21.140
that collects water from desert fogs
very, very efficiently.

00:15:21.140 --> 00:15:23.461
It's now being put into
air-conditioning systems

00:15:23.461 --> 00:15:26.111
to extract the water out and to recycle.

00:15:26.111 --> 00:15:27.511
But nature is telling us

00:15:27.511 --> 00:15:31.631
that there's a whole airborne
source of water to tap into,

00:15:31.631 --> 00:15:34.441
which animals and plants
are doing in deserts, for example.

00:15:34.441 --> 00:15:38.183
That's what I'm working on now
in collaboration with MIT,

00:15:38.195 --> 00:15:42.428
and we hope to get
the first devices out into Africa

00:15:42.445 --> 00:15:46.639
to collect water for drinking
and medicine quite soon.

00:15:48.182 --> 00:15:51.761
So, unfortunately, I can't reveal exactly
the plans that I have next.

00:15:51.761 --> 00:15:55.063
We've got some very exciting things
coming up, particularly next year,

00:15:55.100 --> 00:15:58.391
but at least I've been able to give you
an introduction to the subject

00:15:58.400 --> 00:15:59.811
and say where it all began,

00:15:59.819 --> 00:16:02.955
which was 520 million years ago.

00:16:03.246 --> 00:16:04.437
Thank you very much.

00:16:04.441 --> 00:16:06.803
(Applause)