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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In human cells, there are about 20,000 genes on a two-meter DNA strand—finely coiled up in a nucleus about 10 micrometers in diameter. By comparison, this corresponds to a 40-kilometer thread packed ...

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 ...

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Millions of people in the U.S. are bird watchers. But, a couple of years ago a satirical conspiracy theory gained popularity ...

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, ...