Here’s a news arc for you, sort of like the I’ve-gotta-secret game of signal distortion in which a line of kids passes a whispered message, one to the next, and everybody screams with laughter at the utterly transmogrified version  delivered out loud by the last one to hear it.

In Nature Photonics a team at Bristol University, after studying the extraordinarily sensitive compound eyes of the mantis shrimp that lives in Australian waters, declared that their ability to distinguish colors and polarities of light might inspire engineering of far better optical readers of the data in CDs and DVDs, among other things. It has to do with something called a “natural full visible-range achromatic quarter-wave retarder” possessed by this stomatopod crustacean. All totally speculative, if confident. The Australian newspaper then picked up the Reuters version that calls it a “key to developing a new tpe of super high-quality DVD player.” And THEN the story resurfaced in the UK’s Inquirer where writer Ed Berridge, citing the story in The Australian, proclaims that “British Boffins have come up with a super high-quality DVD based on the eyes of an Aussie shrimp.“  Starting with speculation and ending with finished product, that story just got better and better with each telling.

It IS interesting, and it is getting circulation largely because a vaguely cute, certainly colorful,  bug-eyed critter is involved.

Other Stories:

• Wired Science – Brandon Keim: Mantis Shrimp Eyes Might Inspire New High-Def Devices ; Keim has written about these animals and their eyes before: 2008 story..
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne: Shrimp eyes could lead to new generation of DVD players ;
• ABC Science (Australia): Shrimp eyes tuned to polarized light ; The writer seems to confuse the fresh news – the biomimetic possibilities in shrimp eyes – with the year+ old news that they can detect and process polarized light. But Phillips does dive deep into the intricacies of circular polarized light, R8 receptor cells, and quarter-wave retarders.
• Reuters – Ben Hirschler: Shrimp’s eye points way to better DVDs ; Same piece as highlighted in 2d graf above in ref. to The Australian article.
• LiveScience: Sea Creature’s Amazing Eyues Could Inspire New DVD Players ;

Grist for the Mill:  Bristol U. Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.