Butterflies are beautiful, fragile, natural, and apparently solar powered. Research suggests that certain scales on butterfly wings are nanobiologically-tuned to absorb heat from sunlight, enabling the insect to survive in colder or higher-altitudes than normal. Now some scientists offer ecologists a nasty choice: you can have higher-efficiency solar cells but we have to burn butterfly wings to make them.
That isn't a Disney-villain plot. Shanghai scientists made cells mimicking
the buttery scales, but this is less "chameleon look at them and be like them"
mimic, more "horror movie murderer kill them and steal their skin" mimic.
Specifically, the wings have to be soaked in chemicals and burned away in an
oven at five hundred degrees Celsius. This leaves a titanium-dioxide "butterfly
microstructure photo-anode." We lack the nanotech to rebuild the unique
cross-ribbed quasi-honeycomb structure, but
clipped from: www.dailygalaxy.com 
Butterflies are beautiful, fragile, natural, and apparently solar powered. Research suggests that certain scales on butterfly wings are nanobiologically-tuned to absorb heat from sunlight, enabling the insect to survive in colder or higher-altitudes than normal. Now some scientists offer ecologists a nasty choice: you can have higher-efficiency solar cells but we have to burn butterfly wings to make them.