Photonic Crystals: Liquid‐Impermeable Inverse Opals with Invariant Photonic Bandgap (Adv. Mater. 7/2015)

Springtails, insects that live in soil, have developed an omniphobic nanoarchitecture to breathe through their skin. The skin structure is mimicked and created on the surface of inverse opals by W. S. Chang, S.-H. Kim and co-workers on page 1282 to render the surface liquid-impermeable. The resulting inverse opals can provide invariant photonic bandgap under liquids with a wide spectrum of polarity. The authors acknowledge Brian Valentine for the image of the springtail.