Video: How superhydrophobic materials stay totally dry

Scientists at The Australian National University (ANU) have developed a new spray-on material with a remarkable ability to repel water.

Imagine a raincoat that heals a scratch by shedding the part of the outer layer that's damaged. To create such a material, scientists have turned to nature for inspiration. They report in ACS' journal Langmuir a water-repellant ...

A new polymer on the basis of a trick used by mussels has been developed by the Wageningen PhD student Juan Yang. The polymer should be able to let water-based paint flow better and produce water resistant coatings. Yang ...

A new class of superhydrophobic nanomaterials might simplify the process of protecting surfaces from water.

What happens when a drop of water falls on a lotus leaf? It’s not a philosophical question, but a natural phenomenon scientists have been studying, and trying to make sense of, for hundreds of years. 

Water has an unusual property when it flows closely to some specially designed surfaces—its speed isn't equal to zero, even in the layer that directly touches the wall. This means that liquid doesn't adhere to the surface, ...

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has come up with a new type of cermet that could prove especially useful as a heat exchanger in solar power plants. In their paper published in the journal ...

Inside smartphones and computer displays are metals known as the rare earths. Mining and purifying these metals involves waste- and energy-intense processes. Better processes are needed. Previous work has shown that specific ...

Collapsible dog bowls, bendable medical tubes and drinking straws all seem to work on a common principle, snapping into a variety of mechanically stable and useful states. Despite the many applications for such "designer ...

Some bacterial pathogens, including those that cause strep throat and pneumonia, are able to create the components necessary to replicate their DNA without the usually required metal ions. This process may allow infectious ...

Pioneering research has given a fascinating fresh insight into how animal nervous systems evolved from simple structures to become the complex network transmitting signals between different parts of the body.

A measurable criterion now exists for determining the age rating of films. A group of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz has found that the concentration of isoprene in cinema air correlates with ...