Light—as a Feather

On lists of optics “firsts,” sometimes Scottish scientist James Gregory was the first to use a diffraction grating, in 1673. Instead of making one himself, or having it constructed by others (as Thomas Young or David Rittenhouse later did) he simply used a bird feather, observing the splitting of white light into different colors when it passed through the nearly-indentical and equally-spaced barbs. But is this an accurate statement? How did he come to experiment with feathers, what was he hoping to find, and how well did he understand the phenomena he observed? How should we properly calassigy Gregory’s experiment?

Study of laser actions by bird’s feathers with photonic crystals

Random lasers had been made by some biomaterials as light scattering materials, but natural photonic crystals have been rarely reported as scattering materials. Here we demonstrate the ability of natural photonic crystals to drive laser actions by sandwiched the feathers of the Turquoise-Fronted Amazon parrot and dye between two plastic films. Parrot feathers comprise abundant photonic crystals, and different color feathers compose of different ratios of the photonic crystal, which directly affect the feather reflectance. In this study, the multi-reflection scattering that occurred at the interface between the photonic crystal and gain media efficiently reduce the threshold; therefore, the more photonic crystal constitutes in the feathers; the lower threshold can be obtained. The random lasers can be easily made by the integration of bird feather photonic crystals and dye with a simple and sustainable manufacturing approach.

Study of Laser Actions by Bird’s Feathers With Photonic Crystals

Random lasers had been made by some biomaterials as light scattering materials, but natural photonic crystals have been rarely reported as scattering materials. Here we demonstrate the ability of natural photonic crystals to drive laser actions by sandwiched the feathers of the Turquoise-Fronted Amazon parrot and dye between two plastic films. Parrot feathers comprise abundant photonic crystals, and different color feathers compose of different ratios of the photonic crystal, which directly affect the feather reflectance. In this study, the multi-reflection scattering that occurred at the interface between the photonic crystal and gain media efficiently reduce the threshold; therefore, the more photonic crystal constitutes in the feathers; the lower threshold can be obtained. The random lasers can be easily made by the integration of bird feather photonic crystals and dye with a simple and sustainable manufacturing approach.

Bird Feather Removal Machine: Design and Development

Poultry product have seen increasing consumers demand in recent times and processing of poultry meat is a pain staking process which is becoming extremely tasking and uneconomical given the increase in demand especially in the rural community where there is no ready access to sophisticated equipment. The Nigerian poultry sector is extremely fragmented as most poultry farmers dedicate a small setup space to satisfy small scale demand of less than 1,000 birds [1]. In commercial events, the development of a poultry de-feathering machine becomes of high priority to meet the demand for poultry products. This paper therefore advocates the implementation of the modified defeathering machine as a suitable substitute of the tradition system which is slow and tedious. This proposed system improves on the defeathering machine with the implementation of a boiling chamber for first stage scalding, and a hot spray channel directly in the plucking chamber