Thanks to Brilliant for supporting  this SciShow News video!

To keep building your STEM skills  and exploring beyond this video, you can check out Brilliant.org/SciShow. That link will give you 20% off  an annual premium subscription! [ intro ] I don’t know about you, but it’s only Decembe r and already sick of my glasses fogging up  every time I walk inside or put on a mask.

Or worse both. But there’s some potentially amazing news  for those of us who wear glasses every day. Researchers have developed an ultra-thin, self-powering,  transparent antifogging coating for items made out of glass.

These findings were published this week  in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. This coating is different from other,  more conventional defogging methods, which use water-attracting molecules  to evenly spread out the condensation. That makes the water scatter light less, thereby making it easier to see through the fog.

Instead, this material absorbs infrared radiation, also known as heat, from the Sun. That heats up the surface it’s applied to, in order to keep the water vapor from sticking and forming a fog in the first place. It’s made up of an incredibly thin  layer of gold clusters sandwiched between two super-thin layers of titanium oxide.

The entire thing is a mere 10 nanometers thick. Gold leaf is absolutely chunky in comparison. Since it’s super thin and  absorbs mostly infrared radiation , not visible light, the  coating is entirely see-through,   perfect for eyeglasses and car windshields.

In trials, the researchers found this coating is great at keeping fog from  forming as well as removing fog. Visibility on a fogged-up item  was recovered three times faster with the coating than without it. And they found that even on cloudy days the  coating still did what it was designed to do, so it’s not dependent on direct sunlight in order to work its antifog powers.

The thinness of the coating allows it to be  applied to large items like building windows, flexible surfaces, and under coatings  applied to transparent items, keeping the material protected from  damage by scratches or chemicals. No word yet on when this technology is coming  to an optometrist near you, but if it is, I intend to be the first in line. And if that bit of news didn’t  put your jaw on the floor, maybe this next story will, or at least it’ll make you think about jaws more.

All modern-day birds have beaks. News flash, I know, but they evolved from ancestors  with very different toothy jaws. That means beak structure has shaped researchers’  understanding of the evolutionary progression from dinosaur ancestors to the thousands  of birds species that we know today.

But a newly described fossil bird from Europe has scientists reconsidering  what they thought they knew about how and when the beaks  of modern-day birds evolved. The results were published two  weeks ago in the journal Nature. Until this new paper, researchers’ understanding of bird beak evolution had been unchallenged for well over a century.

In the late 1800’s, Thomas  Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin, classified modern-day birds into two lineages that had diverged from a common ancestor. One lineage is the Palaeognathae,  a group that encompasses less than 100 species of birds,  including flightless birds like ostriches, emus and kiwis. The other is the Neognathae, which  is where all the other birds fall more than 11,000 living species.

And it’s the structure of bird beaks  that sets them apart from each other. Specifically, it’s the palate, or the  bony roof of the inside of their mouth, represented by a bone called the pterygoid. In the Palaeognathae, this bone is connected to the palate and base of the skull in a way that  creates a very rigid, immobile upper jaw.

The dinosaur ancestors of modern day  birds also had an immobile upper jaw, so researchers have long believed that the ancestor of all living  birds shared this ancient trait. In fact, the very word  Palaeognathae means ancient jaw. Neognathae, on the other hand,  have a very mobile upper jaw.

The pterygoid forms a mobile  joint with the bones around it, separating the palate from the rest of the skull and giving the upper jaw a lot of flexibility. There are lots of benefits to upper jaw mobility, including having stronger bites and the ability  to handle a variety of different food types. Neognathae means new jaw, and this lineage was believed  to have evolved later with its new feature that is  shared by most modern-day birds.

Dinosaur ancestors didn’t have mobile jaws, so it seems reasonable to assume  that birds with immobile jaws have the older, ancestral trait. See, when it comes to evolution, making big changes to important traits  like jaw structure is hard to do. So when there’s evidence of major modifications, the assumption is that those changes happened the fewest number of times possible, which is why you’d think that the  neognaths’ type of jaw is the newer one.

It’s like Occam’s Razor for evolutionary biology: the simplest solution is often the most likely. But… this fossil shows that what  makes sense isn’t always right. This 67-million-year-old bird species belongs to a lineage of birds called Ichthyornithes, which are distant cousins of today’s modern birds.

There wasn’t much left as far as the  skull of this ancient bird was concerned — just two pieces. But it turns out that they were crucial pieces, because one of them was the pterygoid bone. Through 3-D imaging and comparison  to several modern bird pterygoids,   the researchers were able to determine  that the pterygoid of this ancient bird   species is more like that of new  jaw birds than ancient jaw birds.

In other words, this old bird could do new  bird tricks because its upper jaw was mobile. Which turns the long-standing  evolutionary theory of bird jaws on its head, pointing towards an ancestor of  modern-day birds having a mobile jaw, not immobile as previously thought. So, birds in the Neognathae lineage are  the ones with the more ancient jaws, not the Palaeognathae, which lost their upper jaw  mobility somewhere along the way.

Not as neat of an explanation as the old theory, but that’s how it goes in  evolutionary biology sometimes. You’ve got to find the places where  real life is messier than logic. We can do so much by harnessing  the power of the Sun, like make self-defogging glasses!

And if you’re as jazzed about solar power as I am, you can learn even more about it in  the Brilliant course on Solar Energy. Brilliant is an online learning  platform that offers guided courses in math, science, and engineering,  all with a focus on problem-solving. So solar energy definitely  falls within their specialties.

Their Solar Energy course  was written in collaboration with a doctor of mechanical engineering form MIT who literally wrote their  dissertation on the topic. But you don’t have to have a  Ph. D. to understand it all.

The course goes from the properties  of sunlight and solar thermal basics to photovoltaics and semiconductors. There’s something for everyone. To get started with Brilliant today, you can click the link in  the description down below, which gives you 20% off an annual  Premium Brilliant subscription. before you commit to a year of Brilliant, you can try it for free using that link  or by visiting Brilliant.org/SciShow.

Thanks to Brilliant for  supporting this SciShow video and thank you for sticking around for  the very end of it. Love that for you. This is great, I honestly am grateful.

Thank you so much [ outro ]