Explore synthetic material applications that mimic iridescent opal, enabling vibrant displays in electronic paper and advertising. developers, who said they’re ready to sell the technology today, ...

Opals have a unique property: Their color comes not from pigment, but from their internal molecular structure, which is organized in such a way that it reflects certain wavelengths of light. This ...

Perfect synthetic opals could be produced by copying a technique used by a small beetle, say researchers in this week’s Nature. “The interesting thing is that this has been found in a living organism, ...

A new method for fabricating polymer opals could lead to new applications that could benefit from their color changing properties. A method for mass producing polymer opals that allow novel ...