Living organisms have evolved highly organized nanostructures that perform numerous functions including color production, antimicrobial defense, filtration, and thermoregulation. We use techniques including light and electron microscopy, tomography and atomic force microscopy to examine the structure of these tissues and use optical/acoustic/thermal modeling to determine how they create their effects. We then expand these findings to both more fundamental studies, such as determining how these nanostructures grow in decveloping tissues and evolve across deep time, and to more applied studies, such as replicating them with synthetic or natural precurosors to produce new materials with interesting properties.