The monarch butterfly is a beautiful and colorful creature, but it takes time to reach this stage of its adult life.

Patterns of tiny bumps on this South American butterfly’s wings allow it to appear completely transparent. Now, engineers have mimicked these nanostructures in an eye implant for people with ...

Butterflies are common throughout the world; however, there is more to them than meets the eye. From optical illusions in their wings to generation-spanning migrations and caterpillars committing ...

Sections of the wings of a longtail glasswing butterfly are almost perfectly transparent. Three years ago, Caltech postdoctoral researcher Radwanul Hasan Siddique -- at the time working on a ...

Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have studied the wings of glasswing butterflies in an effort to determine what causes their low-reflective nature. It's believed that the ...

These enigmatic, transparent butterfly wings have not been studied comprehensively. Doris Gomez and Marianne Elias (French National Center for Scientific Research) set out to change that.

Inspired by tiny nanostructures on transparent butterfly wings, engineers at Caltech have developed a synthetic analogue for eye implants that makes them more effective and longer-lasting. A paper ...

They found that the glasswing butterfly's wings develop differently than opaque species, with a lower density of precursor scale cells in the areas that will later develop as transparent.

Its wings are almost perfectly transparent due to tiny surface microscale features that redirect light striking the wings so that the rays pass through, regardless of the original angle at which they ...

The transparent sections of the glasswing butterfly's wings barely reflect any light, which is why we've previously heard about them inspiring glare-free device screens. Now, their antireflective ...

Finding a clearwing butterfly isn’t difficult, says Marianne Elias, so long as you’re 6,000 feet up in the mountains of Ecuador. There, in the densely-foliated tropics, several species of ...