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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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.