Description
HarperCollins Publishers The Gecko'S Foot : How Scientists Are Taking A Leaf From Nature'S Book by Peter Forbes
A cuttingedge science book in the style of Fermats Last Theorem and Chaos from an exciting and accessible new voice in popular science writing.
Bioinspiration is a form of engineering but not in the conventional sense. Extending beyond our established and preconceived notions scientists architects and engineers are looking at imitating nature by manufacturing wet materials such as spider silk or the surface of the geckos foot.
The amazing power of the geckos foot has long been known it can climb a vertical glass wall and even walk upside down on the ceiling but no ideas could be harnessed from it because its mechanism could not be seen with the power of optical microscopes. Recently however the secret was solved by a team of scientists in Oregon who established that the mechanism really is dry and that it does not involve suction capillary action or anything else the lay person might imagine. Each foot has half a million bristles and each bristle ramifies into hundreds of finer spatulashaped projections. The fine scale of the geckos foot is beyond the capacity of conventional microengineering but a team of nanotechnologists have already made a good initial approximation.
The geckos foot is just one of many examples of this new smart science. We also discover amongst other things how George de Mestrals brush with the spiny fruits of the cocklebur inspired him to invent Velcro; how the shape of leaves opening from a bud has inspired the design of solarpowered satellites; and the parallels between cantilever bridges and the spines of large mammals such as the bison.
The new smart science of Bioinspiration is going to produce a plethora of products over the next decades that will transform our lives and force us to look at the world in a completely new way. It is science we will be reading about in our papers very soon; it is the science of tomorrows world.