Research suggests that certain scales on butterfly wings are nanobiologically-tuned to absorb heat from sunlight, enabling the insect to survive in colder or higher-altitudes than normal. Now some scientists offer ecologists a nasty choice: you can have higher-efficiency solar cells but we have to burn butterfly wings to make them.
Shanghai scientists made cells
mimicking the buttery scales, but this is less "chameleon look at them
and be like them" mimic, more "horror movie murderer kill them and
steal their skin" mimic. Specifically, the wings have to be soaked in
chemicals and burned away in an oven at five hundred degrees Celsius.
This leaves a titanium-dioxide "butterfly microstructure photo-anode."
We lack the nanotech to rebuild the unique cross-ribbed quasi-honeycomb
structure, but it turns out that even in making molecular-scale
modified materials mankind's oldest strategy still works: "set fire to
something."