Typically it’s the butterfly that serves as the bio-inspiration for nanotechnology advances.  But now the butterfly’s modest cousin, the moth, is serving as the model.

Yasha Yi, a physics professor at the City University of New York, has attempted to duplicate the moth’s anti-reflective eyes with a nanostructured material that should improve medical imaging.

This is not the first time that the anti-reflective qualities of moth eyes have been used as models for devices. Researchers have attempted to duplicate this feature to create more efficient coatings for solar panels and some military devices. But Yi and his research team, which published their work in the journal Optics Letters,  were looking at improving “scintillation” materials used in medical imaging technologies. These scintillation materials absorb incoming X-rays and reemit the energy as light of wavelengths that can be picked up by a detector.

To read more, please open the following link : Nanostructures Modeled on the Moth Eye Reduce Radiation in Medical Imaging