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Why do jewel scarab beetles look like 'pure gold'?
short by Gaurav Shroff / on Saturday, 17 June, 2017
In a recent research, UK-based physicists studying the central-American jewel scarab beetles attribute their metallic golden appearance to their unique 'optical signature'. The signature is due to the reflection of both left and right-handed polarised light by the beetle's exoskeleton. Polarisation is the orientation of the reflected light wave’s oscillations governing how an object appears.