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 ...

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 ...

R&D teams are building on their use of biomimetics, the study of mimicking biological processes, adding in nanotechnology to develop new more efficient hull coatings. These developments are becoming ...

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 ...

In current trends in materials science, scientists aim to develop carbon materials with controlled microarchitectures and morphologies at large scales using renewable and biodegradable natural sources ...

Biomimetics is an interdisciplinary field in which principles from engineering, chemistry and biology are applied to the synthesis of materials, synthetic systems or machines that have functions that ...

Mission Issued]You are the lead engineer at a "Biomimetics" research lab! You are developing self-replicating nanorobots that treat the body by mimicking the way biological cells divide and multiply.

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.

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, ...