The visionary father of experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage, once created a legendary film called Mothlight (watch it on the By Brakhage – Anthology DVD), composed entirely by gluing the wings of moths to film. Recent studies indicate that perhaps his extraordinary intuition has now seeped from celluloid into science, according to BBC News: “The way light is extracted from the butterfly’s system is more than an analogy – it’s all but identical in design to the LED,” explains University of Exeter researcher Pete Vukusic. Fluorescent patches on the wings of African swallowtail butterflies work in a very similar way to to the innovative designs of cutting edge high emission light emitting diodes (LEDs).

In your standard over-the-counter LED, like the ones in energy efficient lights, more light is created than can escape, resulting in what scientists call a low extraction efficiency of light. But the recent developments at MIT use a two-dimensional (2D) photonic crystal – a triangular lattice of holes etched into the LED’s upper cladding layer – to enhance the extraction of light. Pete Vukusic and Ian Hooper at Exeter have shown that swallowtail butterflies evolved an identical method for signalling to each other in the wild. Read the full story.

[via BLDGBLOG + Worldchanging]