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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

A group of engineers believes people can build better sonar systems by borrowing features from one of mother nature's masters: the bat. Rolf Müller, a mechanical engineer at Virginia Tech, has been ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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.

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 ...