![]() “I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life,” he told Variety. “It’s not as far-fetched of a goal today as it was even three years ago.”įor media inquiries, please contact Shannon Nargi at or 61.When writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk set out to create the dark and bizarre thriller Squid Game, he didn't look too far from reality for inspiration. ![]() “Our ultimate goal is to try to create something like a material, a wearable device, a painting or a coating, that can change color very quickly like these animals do. “We’re piecing together a roadmap, essentially, for how these animals work,” Deravi says. Applied chemists like Deravi can use it to work on reverse-engineering the color-change abilities of cephalopods for human use. “We kind of broke up the known paradigm of how the skin works in the cephalopod world,” Hanlon says.īiologists like Hanlon can use this new information to better understand these fascinating species. This unexpected discovery, that the chromatophore is using both pigmentary and structural coloration to create its dynamic effects, opens up new opportunities for biologists and chemists alike. ![]() The team, which included MIT and the University of New Hampshire, found the proteins that create iridescence, appropriately known as reflectins, in the cells surrounding the pigment sacs. This time, the researchers are sure the iridescence is coming from the chromatophore. “I saw this in 1978, and I didn’t realize what I was looking at,” Hanlon says. At the time, he had assumed the shimmering blue was from an iridophore deeper in the skin. Sure enough, he found a photograph of blue iridescence reflecting from a chromatophore. Hanlon, who has spent the better part of four decades studying cephalopod biology, went back through his old Kodachrome slides of chromatophores. “In that top layer, embedded into the chromatophore organ, is structural coloration,” says Hanlon. But when the researchers looked closely at the squid chromatophores, they spotted iridescence shimmering in perfect alignment with the pigment. By scattering this light, a method known as structural coloration, they bounce back a bright sheen of iridescence.įor decades, all available data had indicated that these separate structures could only produce one type of coloration or the other: pigmentary or structural. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern Universityĭeeper in the skin, cells called iridophores reflect all the light that hits them. Leila Deravi works in her lab in Hurtig Hall on Feb. ![]() When light strikes the pigment granules, they absorb the majority of the wavelengths and reflect back only a narrow band of color. Organs near the surface, called chromatophores, use elastic sacs of pigment that stretch rapidly into discs of color when the muscles around them contract. The squid’s skin contains two types of structures that manipulate light to produce various colors. Their recently published work on the longfin squid, Doryteuthis pealeii, reveals an entirely new aspect of the squid’s color-changing abilities, bringing researchers one step closer to being able to replicate it. “Nobody has come anywhere near the speed and sophistication of how they actually work.”ĭeravi has been working to investigate squid camouflage on a molecular level with a large, interdisciplinary team of researchers co-led by Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory. “People have been trying to build devices that can mimic cephalopod color change for a long time by using off-the-shelf components,” says Leila Deravi, an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern, whose lab led the study. ![]()
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