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I don’t know about you, but it’s only Decembe
r and already sick of my glasses fogging up every time I walk inside or put on a mask.
Or worse both.
But there’s some potentially amazing news for those of us who wear glasses every day.
Researchers have developed an
ultra-thin, self-powering, transparent antifogging coating
for items made out of glass.
These findings were published this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
This coating is different from other, more conventional defogging methods,
which use water-attracting molecules to evenly spread out the condensation.
That makes the water scatter light less,
thereby making it easier to see through the fog.
Instead, this material absorbs infrared radiation,
also known as heat, from the Sun.
That heats up the surface it’s applied to,
in order to keep the water vapor from sticking
and forming a fog in the first place.
It’s made up of an incredibly thin layer of gold clusters sandwiched
between two super-thin layers of titanium oxide.
The entire thing is a mere 10 nanometers thick.
Gold leaf is absolutely chunky in comparison.
Since it’s super thin and absorbs mostly infrared radiation
, not visible light, the coating is entirely see-through,
perfect for eyeglasses and car windshields.
In trials, the researchers found this coating
is great at keeping fog from forming as well as removing fog.
Visibility on a fogged-up item was recovered three times faster
with the coating than without it.
And they found that even on cloudy days the coating still did what it was designed to do,
so it’s not dependent on direct sunlight
in order to work its antifog powers.
The thinness of the coating allows it to be applied to large items like building windows,
flexible surfaces, and under coatings applied to transparent items,
keeping the material protected from damage by scratches or chemicals.
No word yet on when this technology is coming to an optometrist near you, but if it is,
I intend to be the first in line.
And if that bit of news didn’t put your jaw on the floor,
maybe this next story will,
or at least it’ll make you think about jaws more.
All modern-day birds have beaks.
News flash, I know,
but they evolved from ancestors with very different toothy jaws.
That means beak structure has shaped researchers’ understanding of the evolutionary progression
from dinosaur ancestors to the thousands of birds species that we know today.
But a newly described fossil bird from Europe
has scientists reconsidering what they thought they knew
about how and when the beaks of modern-day birds evolved.
The results were published two weeks ago in the journal Nature.
Until this new paper,
researchers’ understanding of bird beak evolution
had been unchallenged for well over a century.
In the late 1800’s, Thomas Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin,
classified modern-day birds into two lineages
that had diverged from a common ancestor.
One lineage is the Palaeognathae, a group that encompasses
less than 100 species of birds, including flightless birds
like ostriches, emus and kiwis.
The other is the Neognathae, which is where all the other birds fall
more than 11,000 living species.
And it’s the structure of bird beaks that sets them apart from each other.
Specifically, it’s the palate, or the bony roof of the inside of their mouth,
represented by a bone called the pterygoid.
In the Palaeognathae,
this bone is connected to the palate
and base of the skull in a way that creates a very rigid, immobile upper jaw.
The dinosaur ancestors of modern day birds also had an immobile upper jaw,
so researchers have long believed
that the ancestor of all living birds shared this ancient trait.
In fact, the very word Palaeognathae means ancient jaw.
Neognathae, on the other hand, have a very mobile upper jaw.
The pterygoid forms a mobile joint with the bones around it,
separating the palate from the rest of the skull
and giving the upper jaw a lot of flexibility. There are lots of benefits to upper jaw mobility,
including having stronger bites and the ability to handle a variety of different food types.
Neognathae means new jaw,
and this lineage was believed to have evolved later
with its new feature that is shared by most modern-day birds.
Dinosaur ancestors didn’t have mobile jaws,
so it seems reasonable to assume that birds with immobile jaws
have the older, ancestral trait.
See, when it comes to evolution,
making big changes to important traits like jaw structure is hard to do.
So when there’s evidence of major modifications,
the assumption is that those changes happened
the fewest number of times possible,
which is why you’d think that the neognaths’ type of jaw is the newer one.
It’s like Occam’s Razor for evolutionary biology:
the simplest solution is often the most likely.
But… this fossil shows that what makes sense isn’t always right.
This 67-million-year-old bird species belongs
to a lineage of birds called Ichthyornithes,
which are distant cousins of today’s modern birds.
There wasn’t much left as far as the skull of this ancient bird was concerned —
just two pieces.
But it turns out that they were crucial pieces,
because one of them was the pterygoid bone.
Through 3-D imaging and comparison to several modern bird pterygoids,
the researchers were able to determine that the pterygoid of this ancient bird
species is more like that of new jaw birds than ancient jaw birds.
In other words, this old bird could do new bird tricks because its upper jaw was mobile.
Which turns the long-standing evolutionary theory of bird jaws
on its head,
pointing towards an ancestor of modern-day birds having a mobile jaw,
not immobile as previously thought.
So, birds in the Neognathae lineage are the ones with the more ancient jaws,
not the Palaeognathae,
which lost their upper jaw mobility somewhere along the way.
Not as neat of an explanation as the old theory,
but that’s how it goes in evolutionary biology sometimes.
You’ve got to find the places where real life is messier than logic.
We can do so much by harnessing the power of the Sun,
like make self-defogging glasses!
And if you’re as jazzed about solar power as I am,
you can learn even more about it in the Brilliant course on Solar Energy.
Brilliant is an online learning platform that offers guided courses
in math, science, and engineering, all with a focus on problem-solving.
So solar energy definitely falls within their specialties.
Their Solar Energy course was written in collaboration
with a doctor of mechanical engineering form MIT
who literally wrote their dissertation on the topic.
But you don’t have to have a Ph.D. to understand it all.
The course goes from the properties of sunlight and solar thermal basics
to photovoltaics and semiconductors.
There’s something for everyone.
To get started with Brilliant today,
you can click the link in the description down below,
which gives you 20% off an annual Premium Brilliant subscription.
aBefore you commit to a year of Brilliant,
you can try it for free using that link or by visiting Brilliant.org/SciShow.
Thanks to Brilliant for supporting this SciShow video
and thank you for sticking around for the very end of it. Love that for you.
This is great, I honestly am grateful.
Thank you so much
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