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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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, ...

Engineers and researchers looking for the next big thing are turning more than ever to their own back yards for inspiration. Some are taking clues from the elegance of a falcon's flight, the ...

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 ...

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 ...

Where do inventions come from? There’s no magic formula, but there are ways to improve your creativity. One method is to look at nature. Some call this activity bionics, others call it biomimetics.

In order to design a 21st-century, impact-resistant substance, materials scientist Mehmet Sarikaya of the University of Washington in Seattle finds inspiration in a 500-million-year-old feat of ...

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.