Okay, this is really cool. It's an interdisciplinary project between biologists, mathematicians, and engineers to understand and, eventually, mimic cephalopod skin.
One of Hanlon's many discoveries is that cephalopod skins contain opsins, the same type of light-sensing proteins that function in eyes."The presence of opsin means they have some primitive vision sensor embedded in their skin," Halas said. "So the questions we have are, 'What can we, as engineers, learn from the way these animals perceive light and color? Do their brains play a part, or is this totally downloaded into the skin so it's not using animal CPU time?"
Did you get that? Squid skin might actually "see" on its own, totally separate from the animal's eyes. If that's not worthy of $6 million for further research, I don't know what is!
Happily, the Navy agrees with me.
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