Growth of ice on surfaces poses a challenge for both organisms and for devices that come into contact with liquids below the freezing point. The authors hypothesized that surface texture provides protection from ice formation. To address if this is possible, they tested four candidate artificial surface […]

To develop innovative technical solutions, designers seek inspiration from nature and its almost infinite pool of biological solutions. However, understanding biological solutions and transferring appropriate analogies to develop technical solutions pose a considerable challenge. A strategy to facilitate interdisciplinary understanding is collaboration between engineers and biologists.

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Researchers have developed small and agile drones that will hopefully assist in crop pollination and fly in crowded areas. Unlike previous small drone designs, Chen, main researcher, employs a soft actuator in place of the typical hard and fragile design. The drones are highly inspired by small insects that fly and […]

Researchers are using silkworm silk to grow skeletal muscle cells, building and improving upon traditional methods of cell culture. The hope is that this will lead to better treatments for muscle atrophy.

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High-speed terrestrial locomotion inevitably involves high acceleration and extensive loadings on the legs. This imposes a challenging trade-off between weight and strength in leg design. This paper introduces a new design paradigm for a robotic leg inspired by musculoskeletal structures. The central hypothesis […]

The human use of animal pigments is just one facet of what makes animal colouration fascinating. Colours play a host of important roles in the animal world, from attracting mates and warding off predators to camouflage and even communication. They have deep ecological influences, and the chemistry, biology, and physics that […]

Bioinspiration is an increasingly popular design paradigm, especially as robots venture out of the laboratory and into the world. Animals are adept at coping with the variability that the world imposes. With advances in scientific tools for understanding biological structures in detail, we are increasingly able to identify design features that […]

Structures with variable stiffness have received increasing attention in the fields of robotics, aerospace, structural, and biomedical engineering. This is because they not only adapt to applied loads, but can also combine mutually exclusive properties. Here inspired by insect wings, the concept of “triple stiffness” is introduced and applied to engineering […]

Walking is a common bipedal and quadrupedal gait and is often associated with terrestrial and aquatic organisms. Inspired by recent evidence of the neural underpinnings of primitive aquatic walking in the little skate Leucoraja erinacea, we introduce a theoretical model of aquatic walking that reveals robust and efficient gaits with modest […]

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China has developed a soft robot that can successfully swim in the Mariana Trench. In their paper published in the journal Nature,, the group describes their soft robot and its capabilities. Cecilia Laschi and Marcello Calisti with the National University of Singapore […]

The octopus is an incredibly complex and profound creature, and is the smarted invertebrate on the planet so it was only a matter of time before we started to take elements of the octopus and translate them into technology. This article describes scientists journey to prototype and create a robot-octopus that […]

New bio-inspired robots with soft, flexible parts might have the superpowers required to tackle the contemporary challenge of exploring and conserving ocean environments. Unlike their predecessors, such as the human-piloted Deepsea Challenger or the remote-controlled Hercules, these stealthy bots could navigate delicate environments by squishing into tight spaces, blending in with […]

Exploration of the ocean environment has been a long dream of scientists as the vast extent of the ocean holds many things we have yet to discover. The recently developed variants of soft robots may be the key in exploring these secrets. The Squidbot looks and moves just like a squid; […]

In nature, organisms that swarm such as birds and fish are able to coordinate their locations relative to the other birds or fish in their swarm, allowing them to act as one large unit. Other organisms like fireflies are able to coordinate their […]

NBD Nano’s self-filling water bottle that mimics the Namib desert beetle to absorb moisture from the atmosphere to create condensation. This patterned superhydrophobic structure could also have applications in more efficient cooling devices and for cleaning up toxic spills.

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Researchers at Kanazawa University report in Biosensors and Bioelectronics a successful test of a sensor for measuring hydrogen peroxide concentrations near cell membranes. The sensor has the potential to become a tool for new cancer therapies. Several processes in the human body are regulated by biochemical reactions involving hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). […]

UCLA engineers have designed a thin adhesive film that could upgrade a consumer smartwatch into a powerful health monitoring system. The system looks for chemical indicators found in sweat to give a real-time snapshot of what’s happening inside the body. A study detailing […]

Researchers from UC San Diego have produced a soft walking robot with four legs controlled by a pneumatic oscillating three-valve circuit made from tubes and valves. This soft quadruped robot can walk in any direction and avoid obstacles, all without electronics! A turtle-like […]

Mimicking the natural design motifs of structural biological materials is a promising approach to achieve a unique combination of strength and toughness for engineering materials. In this study, we proposed a 2D computational model, which is a two-hierarchy hybrid composite inspired by the ultrastructural features of bone. The model is composed […]

Pakistan is one of the most dangerous countries in Asia. Health care and medical concerns are rising due to lack of resources and leaders. Pakistan hosted its first international BioDesign conference from December 1st -18th, 2020. Lahore College for Women University in Lahore, Pakistan has created a department of Biotechnology. Roha […]