LONDON: A few days ago, a group of scientists unlocked the secret to chameleon’s ability to quickly change their skin color from green to yellow to red. And now, a different group was able to invite a chameleon-like synthetic skin that will allow anyone to change their skin color as preferred.
The team produced an amazingly thin material that resembles the chameleon’s ability to change color. The product was described as the “material of many colors” as it opens many doors for an entirely new field in technology. “This is the first time anybody has made a flexible chameleon-like skin that can change color simply by flexing it,” praised by the co-author of the study, Connie Chang-Hasnain.
The inventors were engineers from the University of California at Berkeley. They believe that the new chameleon-like material will soon be the backbone of color-shifting camouflage objects and detecting and deflecting sensors that could be attached to bridges, buildings, and even aircrafts.
If they are to describe the material accurately, it is etched with very tiny features – much shorter than the wavelength of light, onto a silicon film which is a thousand times thinner as compared to human hair. The basic description will say a lot about how they carefully and tediously made the incredibly thin material.
The team was able to manipulate the material’s ability to select the range of colors it will show. It is all determined by flexing or bending the material. The ideal characteristic of the chameleon-like material is due to its superconductive properties which made it flat and easily devised with their aspired properties.
The team was only able to demonstrate the stunning application of the material in centimeter sizes. Chang-Hasnain said that, “The next step is to make this larger-scale and there are facilities already that could do so.” This is the next big step that the team wants to achieve in order to commercialize the material.
The chameleon-like material offers many day-to-day applications that would be pleasing to the human eye. It even has the ability to match the surrounding environment for better appearance.
Only a minute amount of force is needed to activate the material, which is something very exciting and amusing. The study was published in the journal Optica last March 12, 2015.
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