Monday, 17 August 2015
Butterflies: Designed Intelligently to be Effective
Butterflies have an amazingly effective way of making use of solar energy. A paper recently published in the journal Scientific Reports looks at how humans could try to copy the system they use.
A report in Phys.org states:
“The humble butterfly could hold the key to unlocking new techniques to make solar energy cheaper and more efficient, pioneering new research has shown.
A team of experts from the University of Exeter has examined new techniques for generating photovoltaic (PV) energy - or ways in which to convert light into power.
They showed that by mimicking the v-shaped posture adopted by Cabbage White butterflies to heat up their flight muscles before take-off, the amount of power produced by solar panels can increase by almost 50 per cent.
Crucially, by replicating this 'wing-like' structure, the power-to-weight ratio of the overall solar energy structure is increased 17-fold, making it vastly more efficient.”
We cannot credit Darwinian mechanisms for this innovative design, nor was it Mother Nature’s invention.
An intelligent solution requires a Designer who used intelligence.
From self-assembling solar panels to the amazing design of the seahorse’s tail, the number of amazing design features seen in nature – and even in us – is staggering. (Read more here, here,
here and here.)
Such design shows that the world we live in is not a Darwinian one.
Phys.org 2015. Butterflies heat up the field of solar research. July 31).