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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

As the world grapples with climate change, we urgently need to find ways of reducing our CO₂ emissions. Sectors which rely heavily on fossil fuels, such as energy and aviation, are commonly held to be ...

L'Oréal uses biomimetics when it comes to packaging, on its campus and for the waste stream, too. This is part of the group's strategy to meet its sustainability targets, called L'Oréal for the Future ...