This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

One of the things that makes your smartphone so smart is that if you pull it out in the sun, it senses that and dials up the screen brightness to compensate.

But it's not a perfect solution.

First of all, it's not bright enough.

Remember how respectable the sunlight is.

Shinsan Wu, a physicist at the University of Central Florida.

The other problem, he says of the brightened screen,

is that it kills the battery.

So Wu and colleagues have fabricated a battery-sparing alternative,

an anti-reflective screen coding,

based on the eyes of moths.

Nature is so rich.

We can learn a lot from nature.

The thing Wu and others have learned about moth eyes is that they're bumpy, studded with tiny

projections. That uneven surface reduces the reflection of light off their eyes, thought to help the bugs evade predators and see better in low light.

So Wu and his team built a similar surface with tiny dimples to cut down on glare. He says the dimpled coding could boost

the readability of a screen by 5 to 10 times compared to a normal smartphone screen. The

details are in the journal Optica. The tech hasn't been commercialized yet, and that could take a few years,

which gives researchers time to take advantage of another property of these surfaces.

They're flexible, meaning the possibility of curved or bendable displays.

Combine that with the bendy batteries we reported on in a recent podcast,

and it looks like the smartphones of the future could be set for a real metamorphosis.

...