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Science

The Beetle That Thought It Was A Precious Stone 47

Posted by michael from the my-precious dept.
circletimessquare writes "Queensland, Australia is well-known as one of the most important sources for opal in the world. Apparently Queensland has another untapped source of opal recently discovered in its backyard, except this source is not the providence of geology, but biology. A native weevil of Queensland grows opal on it's back shell! Implications for research into nanotechnology, biotechnology, and photonic computing are implied in the article. The journal Nature is publishing the more rigorous scientific write-up of the findings."
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The Beetle That Thought It Was A Precious Stone More

The Beetle That Thought It Was A Precious Stone

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  • Biotech (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Godeke ( 32895 ) * on Thursday December 18, 2003 @02:06PM (#7756378)
    To paraphrase The Graduate, "In one word - biotech. The future, my boy, is biotech." Almost everything that is promised by nanotech devices will be inspired by, copied from or created out of biotech research. "Classic nano-tech" (the use of bulky, expensive machines to affect the nano-world) doesn't scale. Great for looking at nano stuff, but not for making it.

    There are already rumblings that some of the computer components in the fairly near future will be created by organic chemical processes depositing layers at accuracies that classic nano-tech might have achieved, but at a *scale* that makes it useful. A recent "IEEE Computer Magazine" had an article on using viruses to create transistor junctions. Even if this *particular* road dead ends, it seems impossible that organic nanotech won't be the preferred approach to making all things tiny and intricate, especially once we fall below the scale that chip masks are useful.

    • Re:Biotech (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mhw25 ( 590290 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @03:12PM (#7757037)
      Biotech is great if you want to churn out specialty drugs, hormones and stuff like that. But assembling "hardware" there will be a long way to go before it can catch even the most low end "Classic nano-tech".

      The bugs makes "nanoparticles" 250nm in size, i.e. 0.25 micron in size. In semiconductor 0.25micron is so old tech you can sell anything to China without anyone raising an eyebrow. The current highend semiconductor manufacturing is using 0.09 micron design rules, implying gate lengths of about 45nm and they are not going around shouting "Hey we are doing nanotech!"

      Biotech is great, but perhaps overhyped if people start associating it with anything. For the near future it will concentrate on and making heaps of money doing medical based and lifestyle enhancing (thing Viagra) products.

      Meanwhile semiconductor people will continue pushing the barrier and makes heaps of money doing so, without needing to spin itself with terms like nano- things. But to be fair they don't need to do too much convincing sceptical venture capitalists anymore.

      Perhaps organic chemists with their highly specific molecules may get to do some real results. But making proteins and complex molecules using cells is not nanotechnology. Looking at bugs who have 0.25micron particles on its back doesn't make the cut either.

      Read the articles again. The discoverer did not used "nanotechnology" nor hype it as such. But after getting a paper publish on Nature, perhaps he doesn't need the hype.

      • Please explain to me how 'this bug makes particles this size' implies 'no similar bioprocess could make particles any other size'?
        • OK, fair enough that the bug makes that particular size and it could perhaps make it smaller, if you find a way of inhibiting the growth of the proto-opal crystal. Lets just say for arguments sake that you can perfectly control the size distribution of the particles it makes, say to some miraculously small scale, order of 10 atoms across, ie. about 1nm. Now you have bioengineered a bug to make 1nm particles, say of a particular shape. Is it biotechnology? Arguably yes. But conventional scientiest would

    • Re:Biotech (Score:3, Funny)

      by Frennzy ( 730093 )
      I thought it was spelled 'biotch'. Move along, nothing to see here. Apologies. My bad. I take it back.
    • Hmm, has anyone read the book Chrichton's Prey [amazon.com] ? *shiver*

  • That's nothing... (Score:5, Funny)

    by blamanj ( 253811 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @02:19PM (#7756496)
    ...in Montana we have diamond-backed rattlesnakes.

  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Weevils (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @02:22PM (#7756524)
    "Opal on the back shell (weevil power!)"

    Oh yeah, I smell a tv show here...

  • An Octopus's Rock Garden (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Beetle That Thought It Was A Precious Stone

    I think Ringo must have smoked some really bad stuff that day

  • Nanundated (Score:4, Funny)

    by Strange Ranger ( 454494 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @02:27PM (#7756581)

    For using "nano" three different ways in six different places, the author should opalogize.
  • ...this source is not the providence of geology, but biology.

    You must mean "...this source is not in the province of geology, but rather biology." If you can't choose the right words or put a sentence together you shouldn't expect anyone to give a lot of weight to whatever it is you're trying to say. And don't try to sound so fancy if you're going to trip over yourself: "the opals are formed through a biological rather than a geological process."

    Also I'm sure the weevil "grows opal on its back," not o
    • Yes, but was this submitted to an English teacher or a scientific community?
    • I don't know who modded flockofseagulls's post as a troll, but my guess is that it may be someone who is as incapable as circletimessquare of using English correctly.

      If you are going to submit an article, you should at least take the time to check your spelling and grammar.
      Also, the Slashdot "editors" should actually edit the submissions that they accept.

  • Nature Better Than Humans at Some Things (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @02:52PM (#7756845) Journal
    It kills me to see how people can be so surprised that nature is capable of producing such incredible things. When there is a new discovery of a naturally occuring disease cure in the Brazillian rain forest people go nuts. How about the fact spider's silk is stronger than kevlar? We've got plants that produce wonder cures. Animals that perform wondrous feats like this beetle that can make gems. And yet we humans still spend billions trying to "discover" new drugs or ways to manufacture crystals. We seriously need to look more at what nature has to offer and mimic that. It's more natural, it's been proven effective over thousands of years, and it will probably cost less.
    • No, the reason that people like to be able to manufacture en masse is because it is cheaper. For some things, it is cheaper to get it from a living thing, for others to produce it artificially -- unless you want to get your aspirin by chewing willow, that is.

      • Plus it is patentable (Score:5, Insightful)

        by isn't my name ( 514234 ) <slash.threenorth@com> on Thursday December 18, 2003 @05:56PM (#7758558)
        No, the reason that people like to be able to manufacture en masse is because it is cheaper.

        You can patent a process for producing things, but you can't patent a plant--though, unfortunately, in some locales you can patent the plant's genome.

        A wonderdrug like penicillin, that comes from naturally occurring processes, is not patentable, so you can't make money on it. An antibiotic produced via chemical, bioengineered, or nanoprocesses is patentable.

        So, the only financial incentive for investigating new naturally occuring drugs in nature is simply to identify them, figure out their molecular structure and determine how to produce them because that you can patent and that you can make money on.

        • You can patent a process for producing things, but you can't patent a plant

          I'm sorry, but you in fact can patent a plant. In fact, they have "plant patents" here in the US specifically for such a purpose. In creating them, the quote was something to the effect of "I am sure that this will give us many more burbanks" - As in Luther Burbank, creator of the descendants of most popular current-day freestone peaches (I believe his peach is plant patent number fifteen.)

    • Re:Nature Better Than Humans at Some Things (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @03:45PM (#7757343) Homepage
      We've got plants that produce wonder cures. And yet we humans still spend billions trying to "discover" new drugs

      I'm not really sure what you're getting at. It costs billions of dollars to screen the huge number of naturallly occuring substances in plants (irrational drug design). And it costs billions to figure out the shape of a receptor, and design a drug to fit into that receptor (rational drug design).

      The "naturally occuring disease cure" is just an accident. "nature" (whatever that means) wasn't trying to produce a cure, it's just that living things are very good at producing vast numbers of different organic chemicals, of which a percentage are going to be usefull drugs. Humans are the ones most responsible for finding these cures, not "nature" (if you can even really seperate the two concepts).
      • I wish there were more people like you around. I have lost track of the number of times I have had to explain what you said to people.

      • Humans are the ones most responsible for finding these cures, not "nature" (if you can even really seperate the two concepts).

        Yes, of course humans are part of nature. The grandparent subject represents one of the more pernicious misconceptions people commonly hold (that humans are somehow outside of nature, whether above, below, or beyond it). But take your thought one step further: nature is parsimonious -- it tends to reuse molecules (not by any "intent," but because of the physical chemistry of DNA

  • Butterflies are good at that, too (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jesrad ( 716567 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @02:59PM (#7756915) Journal
    This beetle imitates opals by stacking layers of hexagonally aligned nanospheres (250 nm in diameter) to reflect one wavelength (color). If I'm not mistaken that's a lot like those butterflies that have scales sized in the same range of hundreds of nanometers to appear blue without synthetizing any colored substance.

  • opal composition (Score:5, Informative)

    by morcheeba ( 260908 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @03:39PM (#7757269) Journal
    Opals are actually just a mixture of tiny silica spheres and 3-10% water... "nanospeheres" are a defining characteristic of an opal; it's not a single crystal like many other types of gems. interesting reference [opals-opals.biz]

    • Re:opal composition (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Thursday December 18, 2003 @05:00PM (#7758098) Homepage Journal
      From the reference cited in the parent:
      Opal was formed millions of years ago, when silica and water, mixed together, flowed into cracks and spaces in the ground, then gradually hardened, solidified and became opal.

      Based on this article -- and on the fact that "96% of the worlds supply" (ref [opalshop.com.au]) comes from the isolated continent that just happens to be home to an opal-bearing bug -- I wonder if the theory of opal formation needs to be changed?

      After all, "silica and water" are a couple of the most abundant compounds on the planet. Wouldn't you expect somewhere besides Australia to have the right conditions for forming those silica nano-beads?

      My theory:
      Opal was formed millions of years ago, when dead Pachyrhynchus argus beetles and water, mixed together, flowed into cracks and spaces in the ground, then gradually hardened, solidified and became opal.

      • It's called camouflage. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by slittle ( 4150 )
        Uh, the parent should be +1 Funny not +1 Insightful.

        Just like oil, gold, diamands and whatever else are everywhere, so is Opal. It's just easier to get at in some places than others (see also: War on Iraq II :)

        And where a certain feature (colour, texture, critter, etc) is more naturally abundant in whatever form, the local wildlife will evolve to emulate it to avoid getting eaten.

        So you have reptiles that look like tree bark, butterflies that look like snake eyes, and bugs that look like expensive rocks
        • So you have reptiles that look like tree bark, butterflies that look like snake eyes, and bugs that look like expensive rocks.

          Now that's teh funny!

          Actually, it would work quite well if your primary predator was the adult, married male (homo sapiens desperatus). Viceroy butterflies [enchantedlearning.com] avoid being eaten by looking like poisonous Monarchs. A bird that takes a bite out of a Monarch is highly unlikely to even attempt a Viceroy. Similarly, these bugs would avoid being picked up by curious males, since we've

  • Structural Color: Butterflies to Jelly Fish (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @03:45PM (#7757339)
    There is an entire field of research on this approach to color and photonic manipulation in biology (I first heard of this around 1980). Structural colors refer to coloration created not by dyes or pigments, but by microstructural features of the physical surface. The best example of this is the morpho butterfly [aa6g.org]. Many iridescent creatures get their colors from structural colors. Some of the darkest blacks are also structural.

    The transparency of jelly-fish is also structural -- the surface of the jellyfish has nanoscopic fingers (much smaller than a wavelength of light) that create a smooth transition between the high-index-refraction of the jellyfish and the low index of refraction of the water. The result is the ultimate in anti-reflection coatings and a much more transparent jelly fish.

  • Sorry, but this *bugs* me... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @04:45PM (#7757970) Homepage
    "Implications for research into nanotechnology, biotechnology, and photonic computing are implied in the article."

  • I wonder (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder how long it takes before this species becomes extinct now it proves to have some value...

  • What's the point? (Score:3, Funny)

    by karmaflux ( 148909 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @06:29PM (#7758827)
    Where's the dividend in opal? What we need is a crack beetle. Get to it, Aussies!

  • Gold Bugs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Colymbosathon ecplec ( 729842 ) on Thursday December 18, 2003 @07:15PM (#7759125) Homepage
    I remember reading an article about bugs sweating gold: "Exactly what happened to cause Alaska's placer-building bugs to build up a gold molecule at a time isn't certain. Grossly oversimplified---and I certainly hope no chemist reads this---the metabolic products exuded by the bacteria interact with compounds in the environment virtually an electron at a time. So to speak, the bugs sweat solid gold. Others think the process may have had another purpose. British chemist Steven Mann speculates that the bacteria could be using "gold complexes...as terminal electron acceptors. If so, then this would be a novel form of energy transduction in anaerobic respiration"---that is, the gold buildup was an important part of the bacteria's life processes, not just a waste product like the crust of salt on an athlete's drying skin." Source [alaska.edu]

    Make Your Own Gold Mine [alaska-freegold.com]

  • Aren't there other examples of living things that grow (or can be made to grow) materials that are useful for humans?

    I seem to recall animals being used to grow skin and arterial tissue for later use in humans.

    Plus, aren't there plants that ingest and retain toxic materials?

    This discovery seems like another situation where we can leverage what animals do naturally for our own purposes.

    It makes me wonder what else is possible that we haven't figured out yet.

  • you mean there's something in nature that man hasn't exploited for profit yet?

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