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It turns out that the flappy skin on a turkey’s face and throat area might rescue humans in light of a terror attack, chemical spill, or possibly from cancer. For ages, the meaty fowl has utilized the wattle to show annoyance or excitement shifting from red to blue or from blue to white. This very feature has given the creature the name “seven-faced bird” in Korean and Japanese, the Voice of Russia reports.

Peaked with interest by the color trick’s possibilities as a signal to warn of toxic chemicals, engineers in the US and South Korea examined the turkey skin very closely. Astonishingly, they discovered bunches of reflecting collagen fibers, loaded with a thick amount of blood vessels.

Researchers found that as the arteries swell or contract, the bunches of collagen do too, altering the angle at which it spreads incoming light, and the skin’s seen color. The group of scientists used viruses called M13 bacteriophages, which replicated by themselves to create the very same bunches found in the turkey skin.

The color changed instantly in the biofilms when various chemical vapors were presented—being a visible danger alert to the naked eye. Hexane, isopropyl alcohol, ethanol, and methanol, and TNT were detected in the compounds. A mobile application dubbed the iColor Analyser was created to tell the difference between the hues, in turn verifying the chemical specific to each one.

"Our system is convenient, and it is cheap to make," Seung-Wuk Lee of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study said, "This technology can be adapted so that smartphones can help analyze the color fingerprint of the target chemical."

Various scientists are trying to develop sensors which give easy to use color readings however are sensitive enough to tune into certain sorts of chemicals. The new tactic was reactive and responsive to the many different chemicals, even if they were as low as 300 parts per billion. The authors of the study suggested that such could be further tweaked through the use of genetic engineering.

"Our tunable, colourimetric sensors can be useful for the detection of a variety of harmful toxicants and pathogens to protect human health and national security," the study noted.

"In the future, we could potentially use this same technology to create a breath test to detect cancer and other diseases," Lee added.