Sea urchin spines are made mostly of calcite, but the spines are much more durable than this raw material alone. The reason for their strength is the way that nature optimises materials using a brick wall-style architecture. ...
For the first time, engineers at Caltech have created a stable ring of plasma in open air—essentially capturing lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle.
Sunlight reflected by solar cells is lost as unused energy. The wings of the butterfly Pachliopta aristolochiae are drilled by nanostructures (nanoholes) that help absorbing light over a wide spectrum far better than smooth ...
Researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst have taken the first steps toward gaining control over the self-assembly of synthetic materials in the same way that biology forms natural ...
A team of researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has received a three-year, $400,000 award from the National Science Foundation to create autonomous snake-like robots that can navigate more naturally and easily ...
Nature has a way of making complex shapes from a set of simple growth rules. The curve of a petal, the swoop of a branch, even the contours of our face are shaped by these processes. What if we could unlock those rules and ...
By mimicking the eye of the mantis shrimp, Illinois researchers have developed an ultra-sensitive camera capable of sensing both color and polarization. The bioinspired imager can potentially improve early cancer detection ...
Robots perform many tasks that humans can't or don't want to perform, getting around on intricately designed wheels and limbs. If they tip over, however, they are rendered almost useless. A team of University of Illinois ...
An international team of researchers has created a new way to color manufactured materials. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how they created the new coloring technique and why ...
A butterfly's wings and a peacock's feathers use nanoscale architecture to bend light and produce brilliant colors without pigments or dyes, and scientists have been trying to emulate nature's design.
