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."
direct link (Score:5, Informative)
The linked article is just a paraphrase of this press release [osa.org], which has more details.
Re:Anybody have more details? (Score:4, Informative)
Difficult to focus would actually be an advantage for most LED lighting applications (as opposed to LED lasers) since one of the biggest disadvantages of LED's versus other bulb sources is that they are too unidirectional and so dump a large amount of light into a small area and so they create a relatively large lux value without necessarily creating a high lumen value.
Re:direct link (Score:5, Informative)
The paper itself has even more details, and is publicly accessible: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-21-S1-A179
Korean anti-reflective LED lens (Score:4, Informative)
About two months ago Koreans published a similar success plus they found out the surface trick also worked as a good anti-reflective coating:
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-fireflies-korean-team-bright-idea.html
Re:intelligent design? (Score:4, Informative)
And that's if you conceniently forget that Jewish religion was previously polytheistic, and Yhwh was just but one of several annoying traits personified. In his case, war.