SOURCE: Ray C. Anderson Foundation SUMMARY: The Ray C. Anderson Foundation has published its quarterly newsletter. Ray Anderson always said, Brighten the
BOSTON Standing at a lab bench, Tanya Shirman eyes her creation: a tiny glass vial filled with an iridescent, sand-like material.
Holding it between her thumb and forefinger, she gives the vial a gentle shake, and the material inside turns from shimmering blues to greens. This is what happens in butterfly wings, the petite Shirman, lifting her voice over the roar of a lab fume hood, told EHN. The spectrum of colors changes from the structures in the wings at the nanoscale, that is, a scale hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the head of a pin.
Shirman, vice president of materials design at the Boston-based startup Metalmark Innovations, is referring to the concept of structural color found in nature such as in butterfly wings, bird feathers, beetles, berries, and the sky.