No Fowl for Engineering

A fascinating new find has been made by research scientists in the eyes of  our fine feathered friends, the chicken.

It has been classed as a new state of matter which is a breakthrough discovery in biological research and is named disordered hyperuniformity, which is a collective of minute particles that change state allowing them to present and behave like both a liquid and a crystal.

 

How does this change what we already know? Well this throws the research doors wide open for optics that  would be able to transmit light flexibly like liquid matter would, but with the efficiency of a crystal. 

In a crystal state they keep the density of particles consistent over a large area of space but like a liquid particle they portray the exact same physical properties in all directions. The whole concept of disordered hyper uniformity has not been recorded yet in a biological setting, but in more physical systems.

It was cone research that led to the discovery in the fowl subjects. Photoreceptors for most birds come in violet, green, blue and red and a fifth one that determines levels of light. All of the cells are packed into a single layer of tissue which generally are ordered, for example, in an insect they are arranged hexagonally, but the researchers found that in a chicken they appeared to be in disarray. A computer model however showed up a more orderly arrangement. It is hoped that the discovery will go some way to assist engineers in creating detectors resistant or sensitive to light wavelengths.