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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...