Posted on 06/21/2021 8:29:35 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
Peacocks, panther chameleons, scarlet macaws, clown fish, toucans, blue-ringed octopuses, and so many more: The animal kingdom has countless denizens with extraordinarily colorful beauty. But in many cases, scientists know much more about how the animals use their colors than about how they make them. New work continues to reveal those secrets, which often depend on the fantastically precise self-assembly of minuscule features in and on the feathers, scales, hair, and skin—a fact that makes the answers intensely interesting to soft-matter physicists and engineers in the photonics industry.
...The blue end of the spectrum, however, represents a different challenge because few blue pigments are available to eat in nature. Yet blue jays, neon tetras, poison dart frogs, and many other animals found a solution that doesn’t rely on pigments, evolving optical tricks to make blues (and some greens) a different way. They make what are called “structural colors.”
...The diffracted light waves interact with one another; depending on the thickness of each layer and the wavelength of the light, the waves either add up or cancel out. By getting the thickness of the layers just right (100 nanometers), the limpet makes all the wavelengths except blue ones cancel one another out.
At high magnification, the colored barbs (filaments) of feathers have a foamy structure, with small, uniform spheres of air suspended in beta-keratin protein. The light scattering off each air bubble interacts with the light bouncing off neighboring bubbles. “And because they are just the right size to do this, they make a blue color, or a turquoise color, or an ultraviolet color,”
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Funny! I have a related story from Middle School in which my teacher explained to the class that we use the Julian Calendar today (not the Gregorian Calendar) which is an improvement over the older calendar created by Pope Gregory.
I stood up, got an encyclopedia, turned to the Gregorian Calendar entry, told the class that the Julian Calendar was attributed to Julian Caesar and had been replaced by today’s Gregorian Calendar. I handed the encyclopedia to the teacher and sat down.
That teacher never liked me.
Even worse, where did the parts come from originally?
Does the plane work?
Evolution is mathematically impossible, even if one doesn’t believe in God, I don’t know why they wouldn’t. It takes way more faith to believe in the impossible than it does with all the evidence of God.
—”we use the Julian Calendar “
What we need is the Metric French Revolutionary Calendar!
But the ten-day weeks with only one rest day... they made some “adjustments” but too late.
The decimal clock/ not so much.
That thing makes my brain hurt.
But I wasn’t as compliant. I went to the encyclopedia and found the picture of a blue jay
—
There are also blue birds and blue herons. Although the blue heron takes some artistic license with its name is it is more of a blue-gray.
Average life span of a poiston dart frog is about 3 weeks. So generations are about two weeks apart. Call it 25 generations per year.
According to current scientific theory frogs developed out of lungfish about 375 million years ago. So, call that the proto-frog. To get to the blue poison dart frog discussed in the article, and assuming other frog ancestors had similar life-spans you end up with:
25 (generations/year) X 35,000,000 (years) = 875 million generations for the features seen now to have evolved.
It's 25 (gens per year) X 375 million years = 9.375 BILLION generations for frog evolution to go from early proto-frog to modern blue poison dart frog.
also on its currency:
Because they differ in color
One of the Bronze Age frescoes found at Thera (probably 17th century BC) shows blue monkeys. The species still exists (Ethiopia is the northern end of its range)—fur is a sort of bluish-gray in color.
I thought this was an honest discussion about Democrats, and how they are special, like the ones that ride the slow bus. Because everything that comes out of their mouth is stupid, and that’s for sure. 8>)
For Joe Biden it’s just poor circulation.
—”Even the pretty ones just don’t look good.”
“And as in the dark all Cats are grey...”
B. Franklin
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