Figure 1 Shark skin looks smooth, but is rough to the touch.
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What do geckos, honey bees, sharks and spiders have in common? Along with many other creatures, they have provided the inspiration for biomimetics — the study of biological structures and the attempt to reproduce their features in man-made objects.
As you saw in PHYSICS REVIEW Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 32–33, the extreme stickiness of a gecko’s feet is due to van der Waals forces between molecules that make up tiny hairs; work is under way to reproduce this in a new type of sticky tape. In the same issue, pp. 18–20, you read about the new Keck telescope mirror, which is made from hexagonal segments like a honeycomb.
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