A whole new (tiny) ball game for color

摘要

Itty-bitty orbs of melanin could someday paint the rainbow. They're one of the key ingredients in a new way to craft a palette of structural colors (seen in the examples at top left). Structural colors - created when light interacts with special nanostruc-tures - are a longer-lasting alternative to a chemical pigment, which loses all pizzazz when it breaks down. Such durable hues abound in nature. Many bird feathers and butterfly wings, for instance, get their colors in part from nanoscale texturing (SN: 6/11/16, p. 32). But finding a simple, scalable way to generate complex structural colors has been tricky.