Week 8 Post

 The first thing that I was reminded of when watching the lecture videos, especially the parts about tunneling photography, was an Instagram artist I have been following for quite awhile called @In_Visible_World. They describe themselves as a "macro-ultra-macro-microscopist" and make videos where they stitch together high quality images from vastly different scales to create a smooth zoom into an object. I can't include a video so I am providing a screenshot but I highly recommend following the link and checking out the account. This video goes from a high quality camera shot all the way to an electron microscope image of the charcoal tip.

 

Screenshot of charcoal pencil video by @in_visible_world. (1) 

My art has always included butterflies, so when I saw that there were nanotech applications of the structures in butterfly wings I wanted to learn more. It turns out there are a ton of applications, from adding carbon nanotubes to a wing surface to make a structure that generates heat when excited by a laser (2) to the seemingly see-through nature of a glasswing butterfly's wings created by random nanotubes (3).

 

Photo of a clearwing butterfly by Laura Gaudette (4).  

Butterfly nanotech is even being used to develop better screens, with a team at the University of Central Florida creating the plasmonic color display, which takes a departure from LED screens that blast light into our eyes and instead use precise nanostructures to reflect back light from the surroundings and look more natural. (5) These new ways of displaying color seem really interesting and I can't wait to see what artists do with them. 

 

Nanostructures on the wing of a blue morpho butterfly. (6)

 

Sources:

1.  @in_visible_world. "I have published many zoom of pencils.." Instagram, 3 Aug 2022. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CgzAHRjDgQZ/?img_index=1 

2. Eck, Allison. "Using butterfly wings as a template for nanotech." PBS, 18 September 2013. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/butterflies-as-blueprints-for-nanotech/

3. Borgatta, Jaya. "Nanostructures in Butterfly Wings." Sustainable Nano, 8 Nov 2019. https://sustainable-nano.com/2019/11/08/nanostructures-butterfly-wings/  

4. Gaudette, Laura. "Greta morgane ssp. morgane." iNaturalist, 29 Dec 2015. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2634740

5. Wells, Robert. "Butterfly-inspired nanotech makes natural-looking pictures on digital screens." Phys.org, 4 June 2020.  https://phys.org/news/2020-06-butterfly-inspired-nanotech-natural-looking-pictures-digital.html

6.  He, Jiaqing, et. al. "Integrating plasmonic nanostructures with natural photonic architectures in Pd-modified Morpho butterfly wings for sensitive hydrogen gas sensing." RSC Advances vol. 8 no. 57. Sep 2018, pp. 32395-32400. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327734152_Integrating_plasmonic_nanostructures_with_natural_photonic_architectures_in_Pd-modified_Morpho_butterfly_wings_for_sensitive_hydrogen_gas_sensing