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First, the team “grows” clear plastic nanospheres in a vat, then dries them out. The solid plastic spheres are sticky on the outside, so they clump together. When the globby mass is wound around rollers, though, they do something weird – they snap into a rubbery material that’s as shiny and shifty as an opal.

The substance may look cool at the large scale, but the nanoscale is actually way more interesting. When the tiny spheres are pushed past one another with the roller, they suddenly snap together into perfect symmetry. “They order into beautiful structures and do it really quickly,” said Baumberg. Pressing the clump of spheres in the right way makes them lock into a crystalline structure that, when viewed up close, looks like the inside of a beehive.

It took seven years to figure out how to create a colour-changing substance, Baumberg said. The team’s big breakthrough came when they realized that, instead of printing nanoparticles on another substance to achieve an opalescent effect, they could instead coat nanoparticles with a polymer that would bind them together into their own rubbery fabric. The result is similar to pouring a bunch of marbles or ball bearings into a tray and shaking it back and forth: They may enter in chaos, but they quickly settle into perfect-looking layers. “Within each layer, they form a nice lattice,” Baumberg said. A similar effect is achieved in butterfly wings, which contain tiny, multicoloured scales that reflect light.