Biomimetics is an interdisciplinary field in which principles from engineering, chemistry and biology are applied to the synthesis of materials, synthetic systems or machines that have functions that ...

Researchers have developed a range of synthetic biomimetic compounds to replace the relatively expensive natural NADH and NADPH coenzymes in enzymatic conversions of industrial relevance. They show ...

Three centuries of research, beginning with Hooke and Newton, have revealed a diversity of optical devices at the submicrometre scale in nature 1. These include one-dimensional multilayer reflectors, ...

R&D teams are building on their use of biomimetics, the study of mimicking biological processes, adding in nanotechnology to develop new more efficient hull coatings. These developments are becoming ...

In current trends in materials science, scientists aim to develop carbon materials with controlled microarchitectures and morphologies at large scales using renewable and biodegradable natural sources ...

What do a cat’s prickly tongue, a pine cone and fungus all have in common? On the surface, not much. But dig deeper, and each is inspiring a facet of the beauty industry. That’s because cosmetics- and ...

AFTER taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to ...

Biomolecules such as hemoglobin or chlorophyll are difficult to study. It is worth investigating similar but simpler structures in the lab. Unexpected behavior has now been found in phthalocyanines, ...

Robotics engineers found a way to help robots navigate through very tight spaces by attaching a shell that mimics the shape of one of nature's most resilient but most reviled creatures: the cockroach.

The significance of inspiration from nature for technical textiles and for fibrous composite materials is demonstrated by examples of already existing technical solutions that either parallel biology ...