Biology, neuroscience aid weapon development at Air Force Research lab.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio--The tropical fish tank sitting in the center of the lab would not be so unusual if this were a biology classroom. But encountering one inside a facility housing the Air Force Research Laboratory's materials and manufacturing directorate is an unexpected sight.

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Lab researchers here increasingly are studying and mimicking Mother Nature's products. The hope is that the research will one day lead to advances including tiny aircraft that fly and act like birds and insects and bio-inspired sensors that can out-snuff Fido's nose.

"The lab is making some concerted efforts in a number of areas to understand how nature does what it does and to see how we can apply them," said Maj. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory. Biological sciences research is a new and "very important" area for the future of the Air Force, she added.

In the lab with the fish tank, Richard Vaia, the acting chief of the nanostructured and biological sciences branch, picked up a Petri dish containing a sliver of clear film. It was dotted with small squares that glinted like holographic stickers in the light. Rotating the dish vertically, he said researchers have figured out how to turn silk nano-fibers into tiny optical devices. He shined a green laser light through one of the squares. On the wall, an image of an eye appeared.

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Scientists are combining that breakthrough in nanomaterials with structures inspired by nature, Vaia said. Butterfly wings, for example, produce color not through chromophores, or parts of molecules that absorb light, but through the structures of the wings themselves.

"If you change what's on the surface of the butterfly wing, it changes colors," Vaia said as he sprayed an iridescent violet and black specimen with alcohol. The wing glittered momentarily in reds and oranges before turning back to its original colors. "You can take silk, a much more stable material, and the type of hierarchical structures of butterfly wings, and combine them to make robust sensors," he said.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently funded AFRL, in collaboration with GE and other partners, $6.3 million to create bio-inspired nanostructured sensors capable of quickly detecting chemical warfare agents and explosives. The researchers aim to build a prototype that can indicate the presence of toxic substances by detecting as few as only 100...