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hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest to share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm laura and in this episode i'm joined by ellie to talk about materials that mimic things from nature and speculate on what we could use these things for so ellie i know you have a zoology background so what do you know about mimicry in nature hey laura when you first came to me with this idea i got completely the
wrong-ended stick and went full zoology and i was like oh yeah beats in mimicry malaria mimicry i did this at reading like during my degree i know all about this i'll be fine and then you were like oh actually no we're doing the materials bit and i was like right this is not quite what i had in mind but i've done my research and in the interest of definitions and explaining for the uninitiated like myself i'm going to start with the zoology thing that i thought we were doing and then
i'll move on to what we're actually doing that's okay yeah that sounds good so the way i understood it baitsy and mimicry is one type that i definitely learned about during my disology degree and it's basically when you've got a snake let's say that's venomous and it'll be really bright colors so let's say it's red and black and that snake is venomous and predators know not to attack that snake because it will taste horrible it's not going to be a good meal for them
and then a second snake will evolve those same colors but without the venomous noxious streak and then benefit because the predator will avoid eating them both so then it's mimicked the colors it doesn't have the toxicity but that benefit has helped it survive yeah and we'll keep it safe so that's what's happened in the natural world exactly but that's not what happens in material science also true so the one we're actually doing is taking ideas from nature and developing
them into materials into technology that we can use to make our lives better our experience better and exploit the same niches that these animals are exploiting for our own sort of gain i guess really sort of being inspired by nature i guess is a better way of putting it yeah to do different things and make different different materials yeah and to me so i do sort of general science i'm not necessarily a material scientist but yeah it's about designing physical things that we can
use that are modeled on biological structures and processes i mean i did my phd in looking at atoms so to me it goes right down to how the atoms are arranged to give something certain properties so i guess an example is how diamonds sparkle because they have those internal faces that's had to do with how the um the carbon atoms are lined up to create that surface and then reflect light buckets there are other materials that are not as hard and shiny that we can
talk about i'm glad because you just said diamonds have internal faces and i was like i'm sorry what now please like little animal face they're just smiling like between each other or yeah diamonds have emotions that's uh that's the takeaway guys have you learned nothing else but we were having a look into so what materials have people created that mimic something in nature someone in the team suggested velcro well the guy that developed velcro was quite a fan of
hunting and he used to go like on hunting trips in the you know in the wilds with his dog and he hiked up to this hunting lodge and he noticed that his dog was covered in burrs from plants absolutely ridiculous like tangled in the dog's fur couldn't get them out absolute nightmare but he was inspired by how well they start to create velcro which is essentially the same thing it's the hook and the eye like material that connects together that makes it really sticky and
it was all inspired by the burs from the plants that got stuck in the dog's fur the birds are like a little bit of plant that have got these little hooks on them right yeah exactly yeah i have experienced this exact same thing we got a puppy five months ago now not long after we got and we took him out for a walk in forest so walking along a forestry track he can't really get too far away from bounding off into the trees comes back because it's on the path quite away from us and just like
i'm not happy i'm just going to sit here like i'm not walking back to you dog you're going to come here and he did this this funny strange walk with his legs all flailing around like what is wrong he was completely covered in burrs in the birds yeah we could not get him off him these little i think they were like the the heads from thistles that had died because it's obviously autumn when we took him out and yeah they have these little hook things that just i
mean they were sticking to my fingers as well yeah they're really sharp oh they can't believe which one did you get poor dog we had to make him walk home still covered in them oh bless him and we had no choice but to cut his fur to get them off him yeah i think that's what a lot of people have found that they are well these doing exactly what they're designed to do in that they're spreading the seeds so that they attach onto in this case your dog but it could be any animal and then go
away like disperse as far as possible in the hope of growing all these new plants and yeah unfortunately you can't get them out i mean eventually in the wild like they would drop off to uh to be planted but yeah in this situation they got intercepted by a five-month-old puppy yeah i just have visions of all these like really long head animals because our puppies got fur it's probably several inches long like maybe 10 centimeters or so just i just covered head to toe in seed pods
and they're just like walking seed menageries but basically yeah this is the whole point of like it's from nature like nature has perfected the art of spreading these seeds as far as possible and making it sticky so that they can go far we've just now adapted that or the guy with the dog in the hunting lodge developed velcro to make stuff stick you know it's funny that i could have sworn i had read velcro was invented by nasa but you reckon that's not true you say
you looked at the velcro website and they explained the real story about this hunter yeah but this is a thing this nasa misconception so i don't know whether nasa's like trying to claim velcro for its own or whether this guy like was actually daydreaming and like came up with it and then sold it to nasa i have no idea but as far as i understand and according to the official velcro website it was the burs in the dog fur and it wasn't some kind of impressive material invented by
astrophysicists for using space stations yeah people that just want to stick to things when they don't have gravity holding them down i'm not saying nasa doesn't use velcro and they have invented quite a lot of really useful things but even velcro's not one of them apparently yeah i expect they probably use velcro quite a lot but i don't think they can claim that they were the original inventors on velcro someone's spreading lies false news yeah and i mean so velcro is kind of
like a you can you can see those hooks in those loops you can kind of see how they work but i was also reading about wetsuits that are made in a way that emulates shark skin and i really like this idea because i'm quite outdoorsy but i'm not a very good swimmer so anything that could help me swim would be great i reckon i love this i think this is one of my favorite examples of this so basically great white sharks masters of the ocean can swim really fast really
stealthy and shark skin is basically covered by like tiny little v-shaped scales all like laid on top of each other imagine like a bit like roof tiling like all these little scales yeah the way that they're designed is that the drag and the water resistance and the turbulence is so much reduced because you can just imagine the water like flowing over the scales that they swim faster then you know material scientists olympic swimsuit designers have taken this idea and made exactly the
proportions of the shark's tentacles into like wetsuit material hey presto your olympic swimmer is breaking records all over the place and you know swimming faster and so much more efficiently and then conserving energy to you know put in the final sprint at the end of the race yeah i love that word tentacles always makes me chuckle i'd have never seen it come up in any other situation but it must other animals must have tentacles so i'm thinking of octopi in tentacles and
that's not the same thing at all [Laughter] but i had seen a research paper on this and these um these denticles are really small they'd used an electron microscope that sees things that the human eye can't see to get an idea of their shape do you have any idea how big these tentacles are wow okay i'm gonna go if we're talking electron microscope now so this is taking me back well you can see micrometer things by eye so it may be smaller than that but then you can see my computer things an
electron microscope i don't know why they're using electron microscope i'm going to get half the micrometer this research paper was also saying the mechanism that sharks use to make the denticles work doesn't actually work on humans because they're connected to this um this flexible membrane it's more flexible than the swimming suit when it's on a person and it's something to do with the flexibility that makes the tentacles wave around wow that creates these little
vortices around them that mean they have less drag in one direction so actually unless you're an olympic gymnast as well as an olympic swimmer you've got no chance they were saying something about there were probably other reasons why these swimsuits make olympic swimmers go fast like they really compress things and they make you a bit more rigid and things like that but apparently the shark skin thing is a bit of a myth it's a nice idea emulating shark skin but
apparently it's not how the olympic swimming suit worked before i think it was banned wasn't it was it banned wow i was gonna say if it didn't really work that well then maybe it's just like a placebo effect like if you tell someone you're gonna swim faster because i've made this swimsuit out of shark skin do they swim faster knowing that where in reality you've just stuck a few scales on it and called it a day how interesting that yeah the idea that you say oh this this magical swimsuit i'm
making i'm actually shocked i i feel like i've been lied to yeah i mean there might be different brands of shark skin inspired swimming suits they might all work slightly differently but yeah there's one i think he was a professor at harvard it's like 10 years ago this paper was um published it got some of these wetsuits from shops and did a lot of analysis and compared it to how sharkskin works which no one's entirely sure how it works apparently because you know you're not gonna do a lot of
experiments on sharks are you well you could try i don't think anyone's you know volunteering to then race the shark aren't they oh that would be an interesting race though you'd be very motivated you don't need the placebo effect you just need an actual shark in the bottom of the pool then we'll see how fast you can swim that's how olympic swim is really trained i refuse to give sharks a bad name though shark attacks are very rare they would make me swim faster if i saw one
yeah i agree apparently cows kill more people than sharks do now obviously you're more likely doing well i'm more likely to encounter a cow than a shark it's no surprise yes there is an element of i don't choose shark on a daily walk but i might sneak it out so if shark skin has this texture these tentacles that are on a we think micron scale i was also reading about gecko feet that use an even smaller length scale much like velcro they're sticky but in a different kind of way have you read
anything about those yeah so i was looking at this it went down into your favorite atom level science way of describing it but basically gecko feet aren't sticky it's not like an octopus tentacle it's not a suction cup it's basically tiny hairs that react to light is how i understood it and then it kept going and it said something about van der waals forces and i i lost it a little bit because that's probably 10 years ago that i did that in a level chemistry but tiny gecko feet having
hairs making them climb up glass and like light surfaces is to do with the light reflection i couldn't tell you exactly how it worked but it's something along those lines oh i hadn't come across the uh the light reflecting properties i get how the van der vaals forces work because they're just atomic forces that either attract or repel things and i'd seen that someone had used this to design something that humans could use to climb plate glass windows apparently i'm thinking you know like
james bond mission impossible up the side of a skyscraper using gecko feet technology is the way forward yeah yeah and we mentioned this in the skyscraper episode that we did with rueda a few months ago that it was um mission impossible ghost protocol i think tom cruise climbing up the bur khalifa tallest skyscraper in the world using these sticky pad things that i i guess are meant to be like gecko feet apparently the actual technology doesn't look quite the same
as that that was used in the film that these little sort of platformy things that put your hand in and lift it was described as it's like climbing up a staircase they sort of stick and you put your feet on them and then when you move them in a certain way they just unstick so it's like walking upstairs but with a plate glass window in front of you several hundred meters in the air yeah i'm not volunteering to test that one the sharkskin wetsuit maybe but there's
no way i'm climbing the burj khalifa i agree that would probably terrify me i like having my feet on the ground and even though i think i'd probably trust the technology i think i'd just panic and not trust my own ability to move my feet just to be plastered to the wall i know the science of how this works but it doesn't mean i'm gonna go up using it we'll send tom cruise up he can he can test it for her i swear i've also seen my pet rats do something similar so we
have a lamp in the living room that's got a metal pole you know one has floor lamps and it stands sort of head height ish and my rats run around in the evening in a little pen that comes up to sort of mid thigh height and i'll jump up on top of this pen and rocket was looking around rocket and groot guardians of the galaxy incredible i love that i think if you i mean group really is the best one isn't it rocket and groove you can have names from guardian of the galaxy that's how you
want to go with them and they suit their names as well they have personalities that match those two characters in the films rocket obviously being the braver one is looking around like i want to go on that chair there's a pole here i reckon i can climb on that pole and use that as a midway point then climb onto the chair and i just expected that once you lift all four feet and her tail off the barrier that she was standing on that that would be it should fall to the
floor because it's this this sheer shiny metal pole but no she just hung there as if she was incredibly comfortable with a little tail wrapped around it gripping on oh i feel so proud of her i was just amazed by her and then i have to tell her [Laughter] i watch the squirrel pretty much every day will come into the garden shimmy up the bird feeder pole wait on the seed tray have a look around and then climb all the way to the top and some days he can do it fine and some days he's doing
the fireman's pole slide dramatically back down to the floor i should film it really because it's so funny oh that does sound great so yeah i wonder if rat tails because they're they're a little bit scaly and they do have little hairs i wonder if they work in a similar way to maybe not gecko feet but maybe velcro that helps them grip because those hairs definitely they're quite stiff and they go in one direction that's so true i've never thought of that but rat tails are
minimally hairy compared to the body of a rat yeah but then why would that be and maybe yes something to do with balance or grip yeah because they do climb a lot didn't he they do and yes squirrels obviously climb up trees and they dig their claws in and they've done this to me when i've been feeding them in the park and they're quite very sharp yes but they've got very fairy tales so i guess that's not as good for grip unless you're getting burst caught in them [Laughter]
yeah depending what you want to achieve based on how fairy your tail is and something else i think we were both reading about this i think you brought it up originally in our whatsapp chat was um insulation that's inspired by squid skin yes the problem that they wanted to solve was that when you get given a coffee cup you want your liquid coffee to be hot but the outside of the cup to be cold so you don't burn your hand holding it yeah and apparently squid skin is a really good insulator
for doing that and i couldn't quite work out how but it's something to do with like a squid can change color and like manipulate light and in doing so could be hot on one side and cold on the other so then your coffee would be hot but your your hand wouldn't be burnt i think this is a really interesting example but then also i was thinking would i want a squid skin coffee cup and then the answer was probably no but unless you could mimic material and not actually
use the squid skin itself in the coffee cup structure there was a research paper published this year uh last month i think march 2022 about specifically the coffee cup example and it's based on another paper that the same research group published in 2019 um so it's squid skin inspired but doesn't actually have squid skin in it excellent i feel like this is turning into a lot of tongue twisters shark skin wetsuits and squid skin coffee cup do you remember from your
degree or were you taught how squid skin adapts its color no is the short answer i mean i've seen you can watch videos of them doing it you know people doing like research experiments on making like squids and cuttlefish and octopuses all change color which is really cool but then how that would translate into heat because i thought squid skin i think of squids has been cold for no good reason just because they live in the ocean but there's no reason that they would be cold or that they wouldn't
need to retain heat in some way to keep them going but then obviously the ocean is quite cold so it's really intriguing to me how that they've worked this out and how this would be actually applied to a material that could mimic this so i wonder if the way that it's been mentioned in the news is made it sound slightly confusing like squids are able to insulate themselves they use these things called chromatophores in their skin that contract or relax using muscles i think
and it's the size of that chromatophore that makes it change color oh amazing if that chromatophore is just a blob of pigment and you stretch it out then obviously it makes a bigger blob the way that the insulating material works is a similar well similar-ish sort of thing in that when you stretch your material this heat reflective layer is made of all these little i'm going to call them flakes they didn't call that call them that in the research paper but i find
that a lot easier to visualize the flakes spread out and create these gaps in between them and those gaps allow heat to move and then these are sort of nano or micro sized things less than a micrometer on a side so again we're talking about really small length scale the way that it stretches is literally you apply mechanical force so it's the same as the squid flexing whatever muscles to make those chromatophores bigger or smaller oh wow so it's all to do with just literally just stretching
it apparently it sounds really simple doesn't it you'd never think of just stretching a material to change its insulating properties i would only think if i'll stretch it then it'll be thinner and then more heat will escape through it because the barrier is then left but yeah it's the same it's the exact same principle if you stretch it you can change that that's amazing what i find a bit crazy is that they want to use this food packaging and for coffee cups and
that just seems like a really mundane application of this really innovative way of thinking about how to design a material ah we must use it for coffee first and then we'll have the caffeine to think of what else to use it for cynic in me says we must have got funding from a packaging company oh maybe it was nasa oh maybe but see that earlier research paper the one from 2019 was talking about wearable things based on space blankets to keep you warm and help regulate body temperature wow so
it's all linked this is a conspiracy this is a squid skins conspiracy by nasa they've been jilted on the velcro so now they're coming back strong they want their own biomimicry material yeah i feel like there's a joke in there about the squids from space that can also change color as well as regulate when we contact alien life it'll be the squids that are angry there linking back to our previous episode where we uh we were talking about solar cells the original research they started off using
essentially silicon chips to build these materials onto so like deposit a layer of copper and then deposit this polymer on top and it's a polymer that's stretchy and it's the copper that reflects the heat but i read the research paper and thought hang on silicon chips are really pure silicon is what you start off with that's really expensive that's some expensive coffee cup insulation that you've got there that's so true i was just thinking like velcro is cheap because it's everywhere
and it's made of plastic and shark skin wetsuits can probably afford to be expensive because not everyone is buying them if you're a serious swimmer that might be something you invest in but coffee cups are everywhere much to their own detriment and if we're going to make them extra fancy and extra good we need to also make them recyclable at the same time or biodegradable or both or sustainable all of these buzzwords that need to be involved i agree and when i
dug into the more recent paper from this year they did say that they'd swapped out the silicon for aluminium and they do remove it from the aluminium afterwards so it does make it cheaper but apparently the copper layer they put on it's quite thin um sort of i think nanometers thick it dissolves in just vinegar it dissolves in vinegar so hang on this food packaging that you want to make if i'm eating my fish and chips on the beach and i'm pouring vinegar my whole thing just dissolves maybe
you do have copper in your diet and you need a little bit of copper in your body so it might be fine but some people are also allergic to copper oh i don't know if there'd be enough copper in your food packaging insulation to be high enough concentration that you would develop an allergic reaction if you are allergic but i think there are some other things to consider but apparently it is recyclable because you can just dissolve off the copper and then recycle the
plastic it's been attached to i mean perfect maybe depending i think i'll be sticking to just using a cardboard sleeve i think that would probably also work as well if not better than all this extremely complicated fancy technology just go simple cardboard is recyclable and we've been using it for a while and it biodegrades so i've got a few little mini examples of different things that are inspired by nature when the japanese developed their super fast high-speed
trains it was all great it was all going really well except for the fact that when they came out of tunnels they had like sonic booms and it was super loud and very annoying for everyone in the area because these huge trains making an absolute racket so they took inspiration from the kingfisher and if you've never seen one kingfishers are exactly what it says in the name they sit on the edge of a riverbank on a branch and they've got beautiful pointed beaks and bright blue
feathers i mean there's lots of species but the ones in england are bright blue and they die and they fish in the water and so that bee hits first and that long slender means they can go into the water with very little disturbance so the japanese saw this and they modeled the front of the train on a kingfisher beak and made it really long and thin and apparently that then fixed the like sonic boom noise problem by like reducing the drag and the i don't know the change in pressure i
guess as it came out of the tunnel back into the normal landscape and it was all thanks to the kingfisher i would have thought when they go into the tunnel because you're moving the air out of the way right you're pushing the air around the train and when you go into the tunnel i'd have thought you can't push the air out the way because the tunnel walls are in the way was that something else they had to figure out or am i thinking about that in totally the wrong way i
don't know now and now i'm doubting myself whether it was into or out of the tunnel guess when you come out the tunnel there's still a pressure change so there must be something going on there so they're traveling super fast and they generate the noise that could be heard 400 meters away to changes in air resistance when the trains entered the tunnel creating low frequency atmospheric pressure waves so then they redesigned them to match so it wasn't going into the tunnel not
coming out obviously you were right but also it made them 10 faster and used 15 less electricity according to this article so thanks to the kingfisher or speedy round travel that's cool so i like how we we started off with sort of a thing you can hold in your hands and then we went stupidly small to things you can't even see without special equipment and now we've got a really really big sort of engineering scale here's how trains are inspired by nature i love it everything should be inspired
by nature because clearly it's just doing it better we can't come up with our own ideas let's just steal it from the animals that are doing it really well in the first place they've had so much time to evolve and fit into you said that niche that that part of nature that nothing else is doing something in exactly why not make use of that evolution i've got another big one for you and i'm not entirely sure how far they've got with this but wind turbines you know the big blades yeah someone has
been whale watching and looked at the fins of a humpback whale and seen that the edges are not smooth they're in fact really bumpy on purpose like through evolution and then has used this bumpiness to create a new kind of wind turbine blade inspired by the bumpy humpback whale fin that is actually more efficient and just better at like spinning around and achieving i don't know higher quantities of electricity production i guess is what their ultimate aim through
i think it's still in testing but this is what they want to do or what they were definitely thinking of at one stage cool yeah i feel like we've moved a little bit away from the materials thing now because we're talking about trains and turbine blades that's cool it's a nature inspired mechanics i guess yeah yeah that's something that could be really useful because i've heard that wind turbines aren't actually all that efficient at converting kinetic energy
from wind into electricity but i have no idea about the details there's a lot going on with wind turbines i think one of my favorite mechanical nature inspired things is shock absorbers that are based on woodpecker heads oh now we're talking and we've been getting woodpeckers in our garden for years and yeah watching them hammering into that tree it looks like it shouldn't be able to survive that but it's to do with how the head is constructed they're like four different
components like a spongy-ish beak and then some fluids and the way that the skull is constructed as well makes it really good at absorbing that shot it would need to be otherwise you just see woodpeckers falling out of trees the whole time giving themselves concussion how cool is that that there's this evolution that allows woodpeckers to do things that should probably kill you but you're okay so what are we putting it in the example i saw was for keeping electronics safe of like black box
recorders on planes so when the plane crashes wow that evidence will still be intact i think that apple should capitalize on this the amount of iphones i have broken in some way through dropping them on the floor this is going to be our million pound idea we can make phone cases based on woodpecker head shock absorption patented we'll be millionaires laura this is the idea we've been waiting for oh we'll have to get in there get in the lab and uh do some research thing or just talk to some
people say we've got this great idea don't listen to our podcast until we've talked about the idea i'd agree to it you're hearing this we've not been able to patent it it does make me think like what else might you want from nature whether it's a material or something else that we want to mimic call me crazy but i have always wanted a tail because think of like a cheetah or any kind of monkey anything like that like the ability to have a tail that like super duper helps
your balance because i fall over and trip over the whole time and i just think if i had a tail i'd be like that little bit more stable and then if i had like a pre a proper prehensile one i could grab on to stop like right at the last second and then i wouldn't like just before christmas i fell down the stairs and my mates out because i slipped because i was wearing tights on their like new carpet um if i'd had a tail that reaction i could grab the banister i would have been fine
that makes sense yeah i could see having a tail i can do what my rats do maybe i don't know if i'd scale to tiny little hairs holding a human up i'd be really great at like um what'd you call it total wipeout in all those games just an extra an extra limb basically is what i need yes i think they'd have to make a special category of total wipeout four people with tails then we could pit them all against each other you could have the person with the cheetah tail the person with the monkey tail
the person with like the lima tail it would be great i would pay to see that what would you have i'm a big outdoors person so i can see that the squid skin insulation we were talking about i can see that i would have a use for that in the outdoors so rather than having to constantly take off layers or put on layers because it gets a bit windier it gets sunny yeah i just have clothing that adapts that'd be great so something else i would want for the outdoors is to
be waterproof i mean i know human skin is waterproof but then you need clothing to keep you warm and then that gets wet and then you get cold yeah the waterproof clothing that is currently out there it works all right but it's not that breathable and i get quite sweaty so basically you need feathers you need to be like a gamete or a water bird and you need that runner so that you are warm insulated but not like soaked through and then obviously not hot to do all the layers or you could go
like seal and just to have like an intense layer of blubber but that might not be so good if you're like hiking up mountains no it's again competing with the uh the temperature differences as well it's not particularly warm so i lived in the lake district in there north of england or near the lake district so it doesn't get incredibly hot a lot of the time but it is very humid i was reading about lotus leaf inspired paint something about the lotus leaf it's got a layer of wax crystals on
it and it's really rough and something about that combination of wax and surface roughness means that water just doesn't really want to stick to it super hydrophobic so the water just forms these beads there they look like almost like spherical droplets just almost floating on the surface so i wonder if that could be used in some way while still being breathable you could definitely sell that to like north face or somewhere like that because you have those materials like water repellent
trousers and that sort of thing where if you pour like a glass of water it will like bead and run off and it won't soak into the trouser but i do feel like there's a limit with those that eventually it just soaks through because only so much water repellence you can you can do it before they also get dirty and apparently there's a lotus leaf inspired paint also repels dirt because it doesn't want to stick to that surface and then the water just washes it off so
you'd be waterproof and clean you'd never have to wash your outer layer of clothing amazing i also really want retractable claws if you're in the kitchen and you're making spaghetti bolognese and you've got your mints in a thing there is no way on earth you are opening that mince packet perfectly from the little peely corner that is true first time it's not gonna happen so then you're like looking for a knife or scissors no retractable claws proper wolverine style
straight open maybe even just one i don't need the full set i just need one really sharp claw and then cutting open boxes delivery parcels you name it shing straight open retractable claws like a cat practically you might not be allowed on a plane ever because you're always carrying a weapon i'm just incredibly dangerous now with my tail and my one call yep these two lethal weapons you have to have your claw short enough that it would be allowed on a fight it needs to be able
to regrow and you'd have to like clip it like when you have to clip dog's claws and then you have to regrow oh there's gotta be an animal that i can try yeah because surely cat stores bro right so yeah i just need like a leopard paw jaguar paw get the claw just file it down before you get on a plane but they'd never know would they because it's retractable so how would they know they wouldn't be able to see unless i mean i'd be x-rayed i guess you know like you know put through the barriers
the security yeah unless it's something that isn't opaque to x-rays as well i'm going to find something i see your retractable claw and i raise you i'm getting totally away from the biology inspired thing i raise you an alien mouth you know the film alien where the mouth comes out of oh yeah another mouth it'd be funny you just burst through like doorways at parties like [Laughter] i had read that is actually inspired by a bit of biology the lamprey eel has a horrible horrible creatures
i had to dissect one i think second year third year they're just gross i'm sorry i love and respectable animals but lampreys are just horrible it's literally a mouth with like a stomach and oh they're just basically like a leech and an eel had a child there grim i guess that explains why this entire series of horror films that are set in space about an alien with a mouth in the mouth in a retractor a hinged jaw guess that's where that comes from i mean yeah it's definitely like a horror movie
fodder and on that delightful note um having started off talking about material science that's inspired by nature and ended up talking about horror films and aliens i think we should leave it there i think that's probably best so there are loads of materials that mimic things in nature and they can be worn by us some for outdoor shoots whether they're short skin wetsuits that are inspired by nature but don't work in the way they're meant to apparently or are adaptive insulation inspired by squid
skin that could be used for clothing or for coffee cup packaging and we've also kind of mentioned some of the bio mimicking materials that could be used to help with physical tasks like climbing buildings and i suspect there are loads of others so if anyone listening to this has bio-inspired material or something else that's bio-inspired that they really want to talk about then you know why not let us know we are on twitter we're on instagram you can email us we're also on
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