Animals Teach Engineers How to Manage Light

Tricks for light-gathering
and sharp focus come
from observing nature

UMD Researchers Develop New and Improved Camera Inspired by the Human Eye (University of Maryland, 2 July 2024). It seems counter-intuitive for human eyes to constantly jump around. One would think that these tiny eye movements, called saccades, prevent us from getting a smooth motion picture. Indeed, the brain has to correct for saccades or else we would be confused by constantly-jumping images.

It turned out, though, that when researchers at the University of Maryland programmed their latest robot cameras with saccades, the focus was much sharper. “The camera mimics the involuntary movements of the human eye to create sharper, more accurate images for robots, smartphones and other image-capturing devices,” says the subtitle. Botau He, a grad student in computer science at UMD, got his inspiration from human eyes.

For He’s team, the answer was microsaccades, small and quick eye movements that involuntarily occur when a person tries to focus their view. Through these minute yet continuous movements, the human eye can keep focus on an object and its visual textures—such as color, depth and shadowing—accurately over time.

“We figured that just like how our eyes need those tiny movements to stay focused, a camera could use a similar principle to capture clear and accurate images without motion-caused blurring,” He said.

The team had to create minute camera motions and also build the compensating software to correct for them. Did it work?

In early testing, AMI-EV was able to capture and display movement accurately in a variety of contexts, including human pulse detection and rapidly moving shape identification. The researchers also found that AMI-EV could capture motion in tens of thousands of frames per second, outperforming most typically available commercial cameras, which capture 30 to 1000 frames per second on average. This smoother and more realistic depiction of motion could prove to be pivotal in anything from creating more immersive augmented reality experiences and better security monitoring to improving how astronomers capture images in space.

Giant clams may hold the answers to making solar energy more efficient (Yale University, 28 June 2024). What can physicists working on solar energy learn from giant clams, those sessile ‘primitive’ things just laying there on coral reefs? Clams are stuck in place but use clever physics to capture the light they need. In fact, the Yale researchers claim, they “may be the most efficient solar energy system on the planet.” Watch Alison Sweeney wax eloquent about the giant clams in the embedded video, accompanied by beautiful color pictures of the clams.

Solar panel and biorefinery designers could learn a thing or two from iridescent giant clams living near tropical coral reefs, according to a new Yale-led study.

This is because giant clams have precise geometries — dynamic, vertical columns of photosynthetic receptors covered by a thin, light-scattering layer — that may just make them the most efficient solar energy systems on Earth.

The clams form a partnership with photosynthetic algae. Sweeney was intrigued by the purpose of iridescent cells in the interior walls of the clam. These cells actually make the clams dark inside, which seemed counter-intuitive. She found out that their solar energy collection strategy was more efficient (42% to 67%) than any solar cell made to date. A state of the art solar cell can only reach 14% efficiency.

The clams are photosymbiotic, with vertical cylinders of single-celled algae growing on their surface. The algae absorb sunlight — after the light has been scattered by a layer of cells called iridocytes.

Both the geometry of the algae and the light scattering of the iridocytes are important, the researchers say. The algae’s arrangement in vertical columns — which makes them parallel to the incoming light — enables the algae to absorb sunlight at the most efficient rate. This is because the sunlight has been filtered and scattered by the layer of iridocytes, and the light then wraps uniformly around each vertical algae cylinder.

A similar trick is employed by a completely different type of organism in a very different habitat, the press release says.

An intriguing comparison, according to the study, would be northern spruce forests. The researchers said boreal spruce forests, surrounded by fluctuating layers of fog and clouds, share similar geometries and light-scattering mechanisms with giant clams, but on a much larger scale. And their quantum efficiency is nearly identical.

Instead of making solar panels out of metal and glass, Sweeney thinks engineers should grow algae in geometric arrays similar to those used by the giant clams. She is an associate professor of physics and of ecology and evolutionary biology, but it doesn’t appear that Darwin’s theory had anything to do with her scientific discoveries.

Big Science wastes so much time and money on Darwinian just-so stories. The real progress is being made by learning from nature’s designs. Think of how scuttling Darwinian projects would save funds for projects like this that could really improve our lives.

Isn’t it interesting that a similar geometry and light-gathering mechanism is found in giant clams and in spruce forests? This speaks of common design, not common ancestry!

The world is full of fascinating designs that solve problems humans are trying to solve. More power to the imitators of nature!