Biocreativity Benson Wang Some ideas: 1. fish has gills to isolate oxygen content from water.

are "gill suits" for humans possible? Or maybe an oxygen-isolating machine that works underwater, perhaps in a deep sea submarine in case of an emergency. 2. insects notoriously have high protein content and there are a lot of insects. Is there some sort of cost effectively creating insect protein bars with this method? right now, protein bars are created with a byproduct in the process of cheese making. Greatest hurdle might be societal stigma of eating insects. Also, nothing is impossible if Scarlett Johansson advocates it. 3. butterflies are colored by nanostructure of wings (e.g. queen alexandria's birdwing). it changes color when wet because these nanostructures are filled up. ----------------------The third idea is elaborated: The nanostructure of color. If you view close up onto the groove of various butterfly wings, you'd see a very ripple wave-y sequence that corresponds to a wave opposite to the color visible on the butterfly wing. This is very cool because it doesn't require any pigment; the color is not determined by any external material. The color is solely dependent on the structure. Theoretically, you can change the color of the material by simply stretching or condensing the material slightly. There are a lot of applications of this technology. For example, color changing fashion wear, building heating facilitation, military camouflage technology just to name a few. In terms of the actual butterfly wing, how the wing functions and looks is the result of complex layers of emergent properties.

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Note the butterfly wing structure on the left. (This is a close-up of the third frame) The ridges are colored in artificially. The ridges are actually a dullish brown color. However , if you measure the wavelength of the wave of the butterfly wing, youd realize that its the same wavelength as yellow light. If you shine white light on the wing, the yellow light is removed or absorbed by the microstructure which creates this blue wing effect. If the microstructure stretches out a bit more, I would hypothesize that it would be more violet. And if it condense it in a little, I would hypothesize that it would be more of a warm color. If the butterfly is hit by a raindrop, you would see the ridges being filled up and the wings would appear its true brownish color. In terms of fashion, clothes could have multiple colors (easier to match clothing?). Con artists/spies trying to get away could just douse their shirts in. Im not sure how feasible this is, but perhaps military aircrafts could just change its nanostructure to match the wavelength of radiowaves that sweep the sky. Im not sure how feasible this is. Also, why not match soundwaves and have it as a natural noise canceller material. However, creating any type of nanostructure is going to cost a lot of money. From a macro point of view, I dont foresee this shaping society largely. This material can satiate the geeky tastes of some rich people, but I think thats about it. Stealth aircrafts either absorb radar signals or it reflects the signal away from the radar equipment; I think using nanostructure to absorb radio signal is too complex to make it a feasible/economical idea. Also, once you create this ridge microstructure, there must be some way to calibrate it. After much use, the distance between each microstructure will doubtlessly be damaged somehow. This might prove to be a pain in the neck because physically calibrating anything after you at such small scale is kind of impossible. Extensions of the idea: This can be used to monitor cleanliness. This butterfly wing microstructure phenomenon relies on the precision of the ridges. If the ridges are, for example, covered by grime, water, or damaged in any other way, the color would change.