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Science

Sea Creature Provides Inspiration for Better Lenses 31

Posted by michael from the tunnel-vision dept.
Frosty Inc. writes "BBC News has a story about a sea creature that may provide the key to improving the quality of optical lenses. Scientists are speculating that the study of this creature might lead to more than better cameras. They believe that this knowledge could be applied to optical fiber networks as well, greatly improving their efficiency and speed."
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Sea Creature Provides Inspiration for Better Lenses More

Sea Creature Provides Inspiration for Better Lenses

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  • Wrong (Score:3, Informative)

    by fredrikj ( 629833 ) on Thursday December 12, 2002 @11:14AM (#4870937) Homepage
    They believe that this knowledge could be applied to optical fiber networks as well, greatly improving their efficiency and speed.

    It's wrong to say that the speed can be improved, because it's obviously impossible to go faster than the speed of light. The bandwidth might of course still be improved though.
    • I agree with you. Speed would not be improved one bit! Sounds Fishy to me!

    • Yeah, I think what they're hoping is that the new materials will have less dispersion so that many more multiple wavelengths can loaded up onto a single fiber for longer hauls, the DWDM approach.

    • Re:Wrong (Score:3, Informative)

      by dar ( 15755 )
      Fiber only goes the speed of light until you hit the next junction box. I suspect they think they can improve the junction boxes.

    • Re:Wrong (Score:3, Funny)

      by Havokmon ( 89874 )
      They believe that this knowledge could be applied to optical fiber networks as well, greatly improving their efficiency and speed.

      It's wrong to say that the speed can be improved, because it's obviously impossible to go faster than the speed of light. The bandwidth might of course still be improved though.

      First off, nothing is impossible.

      Saying that, I ask you: Faster than the speed of light traveling through WHAT?

      Remember light has been measurably slowed down, and 'C' is supposedly speed of light in a vacuum, is it not? Therefore, it's easy to speculate that the speed of light traveling through fibre != C.

      A simple Google search seems to confirm [picotech.com] my theory.

      Now it's time to revel in my 1.9 GPA...Hope you didn't do better than that in HS.

    • No, you're wrong.
      While the speed of light IN A VACUUM is a constant (3E8 m/s), the speed light travels through a medium is not constant, and finding ways to let light travel in any medium faster is useful.

    • If you RTFA, you'll see that they never mention the "efficiency and speed", that's just the submitter's paraphrasing. And we all know what that's worth, right?

  • Details (Score:2)

    by tsa ( 15680 )
    I find this article a bit low on details. What do they mean by a 'perfect lens'? And why can't we make it? What's so special about the idea of lenses everywhere? I can't imagine that nobody thought that up before. So: what's the point they try to make in this article?

    • Re:Details (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Try Bell Labs [bell-labs.com] to get more details. The 'Perfect Lens' part refers to the fact that nature is reliably and repetitivly making defect free lenses.

  • Wow.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dannon ( 142147 ) on Thursday December 12, 2002 @12:38PM (#4871777) Journal
    What a fascinating creature! Lenses and vision all over its body? Would that mean its vision is 20/20/20/20/20/20/20....?

  • Neat but (Score:5, Funny)

    by Strange Ranger ( 454494 ) on Thursday December 12, 2002 @12:46PM (#4871876)
    "...10 or 20 times better for optical communication."

    Just what we need, 10 to 20 times more unneeded Dark Fiber.
  • I kept wondering what the "sea creature" was - it's a brittlestar [seashells.org], which is like a big tangly starfish. I thought it'd be something cool and rare like a lazer octopussy.

  • Google to the rescue... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Simon Field ( 563434 ) on Thursday December 12, 2002 @03:13PM (#4873309) Homepage


    Doing a Google search for "Ophiocoma wendtii optical" came up with loads of articles about this, mostly similar, but some better than others.

    A good one is from Physics Today [physicstoday.org].

    Looking at the photomicrograph, you would never think "perfect lens". There are a bunch of bumps in a pretty random orientation. They can't be all focussing on the same spots.

    While orienting the calcite crystals with the birefringent axis parallel to the optical axis so you don't get double images is a nice trick, Bell Labs is not going to be making their lenses from burefringent materials, so that trick won't be much use to them.

    The other trick, using the "double-lens shape that closely resembles the shapes proposed in the 17th century by Descartes and Huygens to minimize spherical aberrations" is also nice, it would seem we have known how to do that for some time. (Aren't those two guys getting kind of old?)

    I would speculate that the critter builds the lenses, and then the nerve cells and photosensitive pigments migrate to where the lens focuses the light. It might also modify the lenses as they grow, using feedback from the nerve cells. Perhaps Bell Labs can use similar feedback to get their optics the way they want them.

    Aside from light gathering, it looks to me like this trick can work backwards also. You can economize on pigment containing cells by placing them only at the focus of the lenses. Now you can camouflage yourself by changing only those small spots to match your environment.

  • I assume that the critter is already patented. Much like the patents on silkworms. They still can't reproduce silk, much less spider silk.. Will the industrial process on growing these crystals be any easier?
    • They can make spider silk, its not the same as just collecting it like silkworms, as spiders dont take well to animal husbandry, but its an interesting process. Goat embryos are genetically modified so the milk they produce will contain the protien in spider silk. The goats are milked, protien extracted, and spun into fibers.
  • Scientists are speculating that the study of this creature might lead to more than better cameras. They believe that this knowledge could be applied to optical fiber networks as well, greatly improving their efficiency and speed.

    So this sea creature is going to help us increase the speed of light? Amazing!

    (I'm sure they meant effective throughput of an entire cluster of fiber or some other property that's actually possible to alter.)
  • At least for now, that is. Replicating the functions of biological systems perfectly using hard technology is pretty damn difficult with today's technology. Before this can really become feasible, we need to get really good at simulating biological systems.

    That's the thing with a lot of studies like these; they're only referring to things that MIGHT be possible. It'd be possible assuming advances in our current technology level. The key to science is to take most things with a grain of salt and never just at face value.

  • Calcite lenses aren't new... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by i1984 ( 530580 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @03:52AM (#4878646)
    Calcite lenses aren't new to sea creatures: nature came up with such devices in the Cambrian period (more than 500 million years ago) and installed them in trilobites. A typical problem with calcite is that it is exceptionally birefringent, so when a crystal is oriented such that you're not looking down the optic axis, the image seen through the crystal is doubled. Some trilobites apparently had excellent vision: trilobites would orient the calcite crystal so that they were looking down the optic axis in order to avoid doubled images, and would employ dual lenses to correct for spherical aberration. These days other sea creatures still use calcite lenses as well (not always nicely oriented lenses though).

    I applaud nature for being so clever as to come up with advanced lenses roughly 500 million years before folks like Descartes figured out how to do the same thing, and I frequently stand in awe of what nature can accomplish. On the other hand, I'm often less impressed by newspaper reporting: why, for example, are the lenses on the critter in the article so revolutionary? What is so remarkable here? Why is this creature distinguished from all the other sea bugs that have calcite lenses in their eyes? Is it because there are more eyes? Do the lenses exploit some remarkable and previously unrecognized characteristic of calcite (very unlikely)?

    Humanity will continue to mimic nature's innumerable innovations, but it's a lot easier for us to mimic and utilize them when we know what's special about them...

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