Fireflies Bring Us Brighter LEDs 111
Zothecula writes "Fireflies have helped an international team of scientists get over 50 percent more light out of existing LED bulbs. It was discovered that in the Photuris genus of firefly, scales in the insect's exoskeleton possess optical qualities that boost the amount of bioluminescence that can shine through. Those same qualities were found to dramatically increase the light output of an LED bulb."
Re:intelligent design? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod as flamebait
No, if it was intelligent design, all fireflies would have this. Since it appears only one strain of fireflies does this, it points to evolution.
HID's (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:intelligent design? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:HID's (Score:2, Insightful)
Show us a genetic or technological modification to give a human extreme night vision, without compromising quality of vision, or vision in bright light - at a cost lower than that which a human in a developed country pays for replacement headlamps / street light taxes in a year and POSSIBLY we could talk about altering humanity wholesale.
Until the ability to modify ourselves matches your dream, at a cost low enough to avoid stratifying humanity into haves and have-nots I think most of us will be content to continue the cheaper, more fair practice of altering our environment to suit the average human's capabilities.
Re:intelligent design? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, YOU think you know what the alleged designer had in mind
No, really it's just Occam's razor. When you can explain observed facts with a simple, elegant, proved-to-death process like evolution through natural selection, bringing an omnipotent designer into the picture to explain away facts is overkill. Might as well claim the Teapot summoned the designer in the first place.
Re:intelligent design? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't be selective with the data, and simply through away the data points you don't like. Well, you can, as you've clearly lost all your critical thinking skills.
Re:intelligent design? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're seriously trying to use "science" and "evidence" to explain your faith?
There is no stronger principle in science than evolution. Because of anti-science fanatics like you, it has more support, evidence, and understanding than any single field of physical science known to man. Do you understand that? The computer you're using has less evidence for it working than evolution. Gravity is absurd compared to the depth of evidence of evolution.
If our understanding of basic science depended on it, you would sooner float off the planet than evolution would cease to be.
I'm glad you're religious if it works for you and your family. Just stay out of politics and science and you'll be fine. The moment you touch that, you become an idiot.
More linkspam (Score:4, Insightful)
Click through the links until you find the original abstract.
The paper is about their experiments to understand the emittance of firefly scales. The conclusion is that the scales improve emittance by 55% when replicated on a cheap LED they were using as a test source.
They had no plans on using this for any practical purpose, which isn't surprising given that many optical devices already use this technique, and have for years. You can buy laser-etching solar cell surfacers off the 'web. Google it yourself.
This is simply another excellent example of a team misleading their university's press department by releasing link spammy titles, followed by the press team failing to do their job and apply any due diligence, followed by the blogrolling that occurs when a self-described TV producer reads the same link spam and fails utterly in their duty as well. /. copied it from Giz, who copied it from the press release, and no one bothered to actually look at the paper in question.
Nothing to see here folks, move along
Re:intelligent design? (Score:2, Insightful)
And god is simple? The cognitive capacity alone needed to create the reality we're in and to listen to all those prayers, to monitor and judge all those lives, I wouldn't call that simple at all.
Evolution, at its core, is simple: individuals reproduce in some way, there are traits that individuals inherit from their parent(s), (some of) those traits have an influence on an individual's reproduction succes. That is enough to make (natural) selection inevitable. Mechanisms for recombining traits produce individuals with combinations of traits that didn't exist before. There you have it: evolution. Sexual reproduction and the exchange of DNA between bacteria are such mechanisms. Because by selection and recombination alone some traits will die out, for long term sustainability mechanisms are needed that produce new traits: mutations.
It's just math, really. Make a computer program with a simulation of these mechanisms, something quite simple will do, and you can see evolution happening before your eyes. You can to some extent see complexity emerge if it fits the requirements imposed by the environment better than less complex individuals. If the mechanisms used to code for variation are themselves subject to evolution (and as they are part of the package we call life I don't see why they should be excluded) then from a simple start more sophisticated mechanisms can evolve. For life to become more and more complex all that's needed is that occasionally a trait that adds complexity also enhances reproduction succes. The only thing that might put an upper limit to complexity would be a reduced redproduction succes.
Don't mistake the complexity of the result of evolution for the complexity of evolution itself. Evolution itself is a surprisingly simple principle.
I'm pretty confident that mathematicians could turn what I described as evolution in the second paragraph of this post into a formal proof that evolution is inevitable if those few conditions are met. It should then be trivial to show life as we know it satisfies those conditions. That doesn't tell us how life started, but if mechanisms that satisfy the conditions are discovered that are simple enough to spontaneously appear occasionally, and if a tendency to increased complexity can be shown to be a likely part of evolution (for instance when individuals need to compete for scarce resources), then the question shifts from "how could life evolve" to "how could life not evolve".
Re:intelligent design? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no evidence Jesus existed, and you you study the time when the bible was put together, the letters strongly indicate that 'Jesus' is a compilation of people. FYI: at the time people claiming to be Prophets and the son of god was common.
". In lives changed from being ruined to being fixed, "
personal bias.
", in people serving meals at soup kitchens"
Gee, all kindness comes from the religion you happen to believe, what an amazing coincidence.
The fact that similar things have been going on far longer the the belief in God proves you are wrong.
" answered prayers of Christians."
Yeah, that doesn't happen. Provably does not happen.