Sentences with phrase «feather barb»

Microscopic air cavities within the feather barbs are arranged just so to allow coherent light scattering [subscription required], creating a blue hue.

Unlike feathers of other colors, which are pigmented, bright blue feathers, like these on the vulturine guineafowl, are the result of nanoscale structures in the feather barbs.

To test this, Prum's team gathered feather barbs from a blue South American bird, the cotinga (of which only males are that color), and magnified them up to 30,000 times with an electron microscope.

Not exact matches

On a testing screen behind Morel, Isa the parrot flies through a jungle in Phantom slow motion, every needle - thin barb of every candy - coloured feather vivid and distinct.

Their structure suggests that the two finest tiers of branching in modern feathers, known as barbs and barbules, arose before a rachis formed.

Wing lice dine on the same fluffy feathers but spend most of their time on the wings or tail, where they hide in between barbs on the birds» large flight feathers.

The feather shares characteristics with the plumage that helps modern birds fly, such as longer barbs on one side of the feather's shaft than the other.

In other cases, a feather will produce more hooks that lock the barbs into straight rows, creating the flat surface that birds use to fly.

In the final stages of feather evolution, the barbules develop small hooks, which allowed neighbouring barbs to interlock like strips of Velcro.

In a modern feather, the barbs branch off from a central stalk or «rachis» but at this stage of feather evolution, the rachis doesn't exist yet.

The scientists determined that each feather has a central stem with a number of barbs on each side.

The chick has bright orange feathers, some lined with black ridges and tipped with white barbs, so it looks and moves like a caterpillar.

They found that there tended to be more mites on the hummingbirds» outer tail feathers than inner, and saw that mites often nestled between the barbs of individual feathers, sometimes in high numbers.

They found that the penguin's feathers are full of tiny, micrometer - scale interlocking barbs, they report this month in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.

As feathers continued to change, they developed tufts, barbs, branching features, little hooks, and more.

In this slide, an isolated barb from a vaned feather is visible trapped within a tangled mass of spider's web.

When the Crimson General (Hiroyuki Sanada) trades in his fabulous duds for a lavender muumuu in which to trade barbs with archenemy Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse, suspended somewhere between pretty girl and Japanese anime hero), a bad guy garbed in white feathers who wields a gold staff topped with a bronze hand, index finger extended in proctological menace, the homoeroticism of the piece — already distracting in the subtext — suddenly becomes the main event.