A butterfly’s wing is covered in hundreds of thousands of tiny scales like miniature shingles on a paper-thin roof. A single scale is as small as a speck of dust yet surprisingly complex, with a ...

Engineers have continuously observed scales growing and assembling on a butterfly wing for the first time as the developing insect transforms inside its chrysalis. If you brush against the wings of a ...

Using a low-temperature atomic layer deposition (ALD) process, materials scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology produced aluminum oxide (alumina) replicas of wing scales from a Morpho ...

New findings about this aspect of metamorphosis could help engineers design materials for managing light and heat. A butterfly’s wing is covered in hundreds of thousands of tiny scales, like miniature ...

Pigments and the fine structure of butterfly wing scales work together to generate a mosaic of colors and patterns that help the insect camouflage or attract mates. On July 3, in the journal Cell ...

Monisha Ravisetti was a science writer at CNET. She covered climate change, space rockets, mathematical puzzles, dinosaur bones, black holes, supernovas, and sometimes, the drama of philosophical ...

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The best artists are hard put to equal the natural iridescence of a butterfly’s delicate wings. But new research may bring humans closer to matching nature — and putting that beauty to practical use.

Scientists have been studying some newly discovered fossils of butterfly scales that are the size of a speck of dust. The fossils were found inside an ancient rock from Germany. The scientists say ...

If you brush against the wings of a butterfly, you will likely come away with a fine sprinkling of powder. This lepidopteran dust is made up of tiny microscopic scales, hundreds of thousands of which ...