This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intalyata.

Got a minute?

Bantis shrimp are well known for their powerful punch, a punch strong enough to crack aquarium

glass, but they also have incredible. a punch strong enough to crack aquarium glass.

But they also have incredible technicolor vision.

They can see in 12 different colors, they can see different forms of polarized light

and they have some very bright and flashy colours on

different parts of their bodies that they can display to each other.

Nick Roberts, a sensory biologist at the University of Bristol in the UK.

Roberts and his colleagues investigated how the mantis shrimp create those flashy polarized signals

by examining their shells with an electron microscope.

And they found that unlike the polarizers in our sunglasses, our cameras, and our LCD screens,

the Mantis shrimp use a completely novel way of polarizing light.

And their method, it doesn't require the material to be as thick to be effective,

meaning the polarizers are actually incredibly thin, 500 times thinner in fact than the ones we've got.

Like many cases of biomimetic inspiration, nature has had 50-odd

million years to do its research and development and has come up with all sorts of

solutions that we've never thought of. The results appear in the journal Scientific Reports. And while

you probably don't need thinner polarized sunglasses, Robert says this could be a game

changer for next generation computer chips called optical chips, which use photons to perform calculations.

One of the things that we would love to be able to do is actually create self-assembling polarizers on a microscopic

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