For decades, when people have wanted to stick two things together but later pull them back apart, Velcro has been the answer. In the future, however, the material may get some competition from bird feather-inspired technology.
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Caterpillars are able to crawl across a wide variety of surfaces, they can move in any orientation, and they're flexible – traits that would also make for good soft-bodied robots. With that in mind, scientists have recently taken an interesting approach to analyzing just how the creatures move.
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Xenos peckii is a parasitic insect that spends much of its life cycle within the body of a wasp, but it's also known for its unusual eye structure. By copying that structure, scientists have created an ultra-slim camera that could allow for the manufacturing of thinner-than-ever smartphones.
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Mother of pearl is the coating found on the outside of pearls, and the inside of certain mollusc’s shells. It's one of nature's hardest, stiffest, most stable materials – and scientists have now figured out how to make an artificial version of it, which can be "tuned" for different applications.
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Earthworms are usually quite clean, despite the fact that they live in the dirt. That's because they're constantly secreting a lubricating layer of mucus, which keeps that dirt from sticking. Scientists have now replicated that quality in a new material that could have numerous applications.
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Bats eat a lot of moths, which they locate in the dark via echolocation. According to new research, however, some moths have evolved sound-absorbing fur as a passive means of defence – and it could inspire advances in human technology.
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Readers will be familiar with the mantis shrimp, the marine crustaceans with club-like forelimbs used to overwhelm their prey. But their limbs aren't their only remarkable feature. Their eyes could help self-driving cars to see better in difficult conditions.
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Most water filters work by a sieve principle, in which particles that are too big to pass through a filtration membrane's pores end up collecting on it. The problem is, such filters get clogged with trapped particles. The manta ray, however, has developed a work-around.
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Scientists at Tel Aviv University have used the impressive echolocation abilities of bats as inspiration for a new robot, which is able to use ultrasound to autonomously navigate through an environment.
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If you're a fan of insect-inspired robots, then you probably like creations such as RoboBee, VelociRoACH, and Harvard University's HAMR. Should the latter's scurrying around not be enough for you, though, it can now move across the water, sinking itself and walking beneath the surface on command.
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