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BOSTON—Standing at a lab bench, Tanya Shirman eyes her creation: a tiny glass vial filled with an iridescent, sand-like material. Holding it between her thumb and forefinger, she gives the vial a gentle shake, and the material inside turns from shimmering blues to greens. "This is what happens in butterfly wings," the petite Shirman, lifting her voice over the roar of a lab fume hood, told EHN. "The spectrum of colors changes from the structures in the wings at the nanoscale," that is, a scale hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the head of a pin. Shirman, vice president of materials design at the Boston-based startup Metalmark Innovations, is referring to the concept of structural color found in nature—such as in butterfly wings, bird feathers, beetles, berries, and the sky.