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charon writes:

Tarantulas aren't usually known for having a striking blue color, but the ones that do recently inspired new technology that can produce vibrant, 3D-printed color that will never fade.

Back in 2015, a team of researchers led by the University of Akron marveled at the spiders' blue hue and concluded that it was created not from pigment but from nanostructures in their hairs. In other words, these tarantulas are blue because of structural color, which is produced through light scattering caused by structures of sub-micrometer size features made by translucent materials. They also realized that many species of the spider have nearly the very same color, but evolved the color independently.

[...] Their finding overturned the assumption that vibrant, structural colors in nature are almost always iridescent. Because the tarantulas' non-iridescent structural color was produced by highly symmetrical structures, the researchers then set out to try to mimic their vibrant blue color with the help of a 3D nano printer.

[...] "The iridescence is the key obstacle to use structural colors in our daily life," Hsiung recently told Seeker, explaining that shifting color makes hues inconsistent. "This observation inspired us to look into the mechanisms behind it and try to recreate this phenomenon."

The result: color produced by 3D-printed structures that has a viewing angle of 160 degrees. In other words, when viewed from nearly all angles, the color appears the same. This is the largest viewing angle to date, surpassing the viewing angle of any non-iridescent color that has been produced by self-assembly methods.

Original Submission