Structural Coloration

They can take on the features of a mangrove leaf or branching coral, or run dark stripes down their bodies.

The specialized group of dinosaurs evolved their shimmery and colorful plumage hundreds of times.

University of Central Florida researcher Debashis Chanda, a professor in UCF's NanoScience Technology Center, has drawn inspiration from butterflies to create the first environmentally friendly, large-scale and multicolor alternative to pigment-based colorants, which can contribute to energy-saving efforts and help reduce global warming.

If someone has a "hard shell but a soft center," that's often regarded as an appealing character trait. But for Professor of Polymer Chemistry Markus Gallei and his doctoral student Lukas Siegwardt the appeal lies in creating objects called "perfect particles" with a hard center and a soft shell.

Bio-inspired system optimizes wavelength, intensity, dispersion of light reaching interiors.

Structural colors result from interactions between light and nanostructures. Engineering structural colors is a promising, rapidly emerging research field. Compared with conventional painting technology using chemical dyes, structural color has a broader range of technological applications for color management. Thanks in part to its excellent durability, structural color offers an environmentally friendly route for…

MIT engineers repurposed a 19th-century photography technique to produce stretchy, color-changing films.

Reindeer are loved the world over for their dark, expressive eyes, majestic antlers and magical association with Santa Claus. The moment you learn the cold, hard truth of how Christmas presents arrive under the tree is a harrowing one that blights many a childhood. But reindeer are more special than your cynical older sibling or classmates would have had you believe.

A new study confirms Lantana strigocamara as the second-ever documented case of a plant creating blue-colored fruits with layered fat molecules.

A goldfish kept in a dark room will eventually turn white.

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have designed an innovative pixelated, soft, color-changing system called a Morphable Concavity Array (MoCA).

Precise hierarchical molecular self-assembly formed so-called "Bragg stack" reflectors.

Shape and color changing are key survival traits for many animals. Chameleons can change their body to hide from predators, to reflect their moods, or even to defend their territory, while some soft-bodied animal-like octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish can change both their color and shape to signal or camouflage.

They receive constant feedback about their skin pattern and adjust camouflage accordingly.

Some foods and medicines, such as many COVID-19 vaccines, must be kept cold. As a step toward a robust, stable technique that could indicate when these products exceed safe limits, researchers in ACS Nano report a class of brilliantly colored microcrystals in materials that become colorless over a wide range of temperatures and response times. As a proof of concept, the team packaged the color-changing materials…

As the result of a happy accident, scientists have created a sustainable paint that's lighter, longer-lasting and more cooling than traditional paint.

In a bid to better understand squid skin cells, scientists have turned to replicating squid's camouflage ability in human cells.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers have developed fibers containing "optical barcodes" that can improve the ability to sort and recycle textiles. The fibers can be woven into fabrics as built-in labels, and reflect specific wavelengths of infrared light when scanned.

Materials scientists have unlocked a rich and easily controlled material design space by harnessing the pioneering color photography work of Nobel laureate Gabriel Lippmann.

The colors in the world around us are produced through either absorption of light by molecules (pigmentary colors) or scattering of light by nanostructures (structural colors). Nature provides many spectacular examples of structural colors—the bright colors of some butterflies, beetles, fish or birds (think peacocks) are due to nanostructures that cause the reflected light waves to overlap. Structural coloration…