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You’re looking at a work of art, designed by Mother Nature, that an ambitious professor is trying to recreate. It's the human retina.

Prof: In this case, we were looking very specifically in medical application where a device would be small enough obviously to fit in the human eye.

Professor Andrew Barron's  nano technology team at Rice University was trying to develop an artificial retina, when they ran into a problem.

Prof: What if we don't solve that problem?  All we've got is a solar cell.

Eureka! Solar power!

Prof: The retina is an extremely efficient design for capturing photons. Photons are, uh, essentially light.

Now Barron is growing nano-sized forest of light absorbing rods, modeled after those amazing light absorbing rods of the retina.

Prof: What we've got here is a model of a nano tube.

What's the big deal? Well, this is the typical solar power panel, you know, those bulky squares you see on rooftops.

Prof: It's very brittle. It shatters very happily when you touch it.

Compare that to the Barron solar cell. Made of flexible nano tubes a thousand times thinner than a human hair. The challenge of getting the Barron solar cells from this scale to this, will take time. After all, Andrew Barron is not Mother Nature. Kyra Phillips, CNN, Atlanta.

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