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, ...

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 ...

It often pays to borrow a page from nature's playbook. Just look at the UC Berkeley scientists who recently made headlines with their cockroach-inspired robot. "Often nature's most revolting animals ...

Engineers, chemists and others taking inspiration from biological systems for human applications must team up with biologists, writes Emilie Snell-Rood. In the late 1940s, Swiss engineer George de ...

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 ...

Biomimetics, the discipline devoted to the bio-inspired engineering of things and processes, could potentially hold the keys to solving Bitcoin’s scaling problem. Until now, biomimetics has mostly ...

Michelle Oyen receives funding from the United States Army Corps of Engineers on tough biomimetic materials. As the world grapples with climate change, we urgently need to find ways of reducing our ...

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, ...