it’s unix, not eunuchs

It turns out that an Iridescent beetle called L. augustus has green scales that have the same shade of green when viewed from any angle.  That’s not normal for iridescent objects so it sparked the interest of Lauren Richey a co-author for her High School Fair Project.  When she and John Gardner, her project partner, examined it under a electron microscope they found that the molecular configuration of the beetle’s Chitin is quite similar to diamonds and that they are precisely what they need in order to manipulate light three dimensionally.

The beetle’s themselves won’t be used in computers, but the chitin will instead be used to make molds for the semiconductor material.  Photonic computing is one of the next possible leaps in computing.  If successful, computations that take weeks could be completed in a second.

Wired’s coverage on this can be found here.