this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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“I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans,” Dawson says, “some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process.”

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[–] Revered_Beard@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

To be clear, it's not that they shoot laser beams from their feathers as some sort of mating ritual or defense mechanism (which, honestly, is probably how I would have used my own laser feathers, if I had them), but that there are strikingly identical nano structures that can reflect back a little bit of laser light, under laboratory conditions:

After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers’ eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths.

[–] MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

The feathers actually work as photonic crystals with regularly spaced melanin rods that create a "cavity" where light bounces back and forth until it exits as coherent laser light - nature basically invented distributed feedback lasers millons of years before we did!

[–] Krudler@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

Actually a very cool article, thanks for the share

The final quote that you *helpfully added in is great.

I once read an offhand remark online that said effectively "if Dark matter was real and dark energy was real, we could observe that energy being used by life but we don't"

Strikingly astute observation imo.

Edit: they went on to extrapolate that they don't believe it is possible to harvest energy from quantum vacuum fluctuations for the same reason. Something alive would have done it already

[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah, I'm not paying a whole lot of credence to the cosmology department these days, they're too busy using Elmer's Glue to keep their whole story from falling apart.

I'm not so sure about the whole 'photon' thing anymore either ... an individual, no-mass, single-point thing that can survive travelling through that universe out there for -billions of years- ? The math works, but does the model, really?

Right on about the life thing too.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

There are tons of phenomena or technologies that exist but aren't used by life. The most famous is probably the wheel (with an axel, rolling a whole body doesn't count, nor does cellular machinery).

As far as I know no living thing has selected for transmitting or receiving radio frequency radiation, ~~nor X-rays or gamma rays.~~ [Edit: eventually and with no useful guidance I managed to find This. Note how I linked it so others can learn about it. Still didn't find anything for RF. End edit.] (I'm sure electric eels and such put out some RF, but only as a side effect. They aren't using it for communication or sensing for example)

[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

RF is pretty low on the EM totem pole when it comes to energy. There's plenty of IR to use, which is just above RF... and it's available 24/7.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Sure. But RF can go through dense bush or a forest even better than audio if it's high enough power - and without alerting any non-RF animals like audio would.

Or imagine animals with actual radar for finding prey. IR is good for that (I know snakes use it) but again radio could penetrate cover, and yet nothing uses it like that.

The main point though, is that RF exists despite non-use by life (excluding human technology of course). The same likely applies to dark matter and dark energy whatever they end up being.

[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

OTOH (I was just reading the other day), cats can't even see red (looks grey to them) ... only green and blue. Looks as though higher-freq visible light worked just fine for Feliformia. The organs/antennae needed to send and/or receive RF would be highly ungainly for speedy smaller predatory mammals.

Who knows - maybe some of the dinosaurs -did- use RF?! High EMF from solar CME's might have burned out their receptors.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

Heh, that would be neat. Maybe that's what stegosaurus plates were: a MIMO array.

[–] Krudler@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You might want to do some research and update your beliefs. Yes, some have been found to absorb gamma and xrays.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

[citation needed]

I was very careful to phrase that with 'selected for' because of course things absorb radiation. That's how bones are visible in X-ray radiology. But that doesn't mean it is something they evolved specifically to do.

[–] Krudler@lemmy.world -1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Go read

You don't need me to research things for you and provide you search results

I'm pretty sure you're capable of entering a search query and reading on your own

It takes less time than writing your wrong opinions

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

That's quite some hostility and unhelpfulness.

Anyway, after an overly difficult search (go enshitification) I did find this. So I have edited that part of my first post. The overall point remains though - life as we know it doesn't always make use of Every possibility, so lack of use (on earth anyway) does not mean lack of existence.

Anyway, I was indeed wrong about two of my examples, so here's two more to replace them, of very similar nature:

Nothing evolved to transmit or receive neutrinos or gravitational waves.
Mostly because doing so for neutrinos would require being the size of a large building for receiving, or containing a nuclear reactor (oh hey, there's another thing life hasn't done) for transmitting. For gravitational waves that would be small city sized for receiving, or being star sized with uneven mass at high speed for transmitting.

[–] chocrates@piefed.world 9 points 3 days ago

Nature is wild. We have truly alien creatures on earth!

Eyes of Sauron!