Publication Date:
2015-06-20
Description:
Saharan silver ants, Cataglyphis bombycina, forage under extreme temperature conditions in the African desert. We show that the ants' conspicuous silvery appearance is created by a dense array of triangular hairs with two thermoregulatory effects. They enhance not only the reflectivity of the ant's body surface in the visible and near-infrared range of the spectrum, where solar radiation culminates, but also the emissivity of the ant in the mid-infrared. The latter effect enables the animals to efficiently dissipate heat back to the surroundings via blackbody radiation under full daylight conditions. This biological solution for a thermoregulatory problem may lead to the development of biomimetic coatings for passive radiative cooling of objects.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Shi, Norman Nan -- Tsai, Cheng-Chia -- Camino, Fernando -- Bernard, Gary D -- Yu, Nanfang -- Wehner, Rudiger -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Jul 17;349(6245):298-301. doi: 10.1126/science.aab3564. Epub 2015 Jun 18.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. ; Center for Functional Nanomaterials, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, USA. ; Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. ; Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. ny2214@columbia.edu rwehner@zool.uzh.ch. ; Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. ny2214@columbia.edu rwehner@zool.uzh.ch.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26089358" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Africa, Northern
;
Animals
;
Ants/anatomy & histology/*physiology/ultrastructure
;
*Body Temperature Regulation
;
*Desert Climate
;
*Hot Temperature
;
Thermodynamics
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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