Winged wallpaper

Moths may eat all our clothes but they get on with it quietly. That’s half the trouble. Mosquitoes whine annoyingly while following their vampire vocation and the beefier kinds of fly buzz on their way to the leftovers of the Sunday roast. But moths are like snow, silently settling on choice cashmere. Now scientists at Bristol have made the best of it by constructing moth-wing wallpaper. Since the moths have spent millions of years evolving wings to baffle bat radar, the scientists thought it worth a try sticking little moth wings on to a wall to absorb sound. It worked. In future they may be able to perfect a fabric similar in structure to moth wings to save the labour of catching millions of the creatures. We might suggest making glow-worm lightbulbs too, but no doubt scientists are at work on that already.