Over the last few decades, knowledge transfer from biological concepts to generate technical applications has been receiving increasing attention, often inspiring sustainable biomimetic products in the process. In the past weeks, we have discussed about multiple functional surfaces and how they can be implemented into technical applications. For the theme of surfaces, I will discuss...
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Do you remember that wool pullover from your grandma? Yeah, the heavy one with much more than 2 colors or a very tasteful motive on. It is that one that you only wear once a year when your grandma is there. The itchy one. When you think about this pullover your skin turns red. Several...
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Recently, I watched an old family video that we recorded when we were on holidays in the Mediterranean. To my surprise, the only sound I heard was the unpleasant noise of insects that appear in huge numbers in this area. It does not matter how hard I tried every year to see one, they are...
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Sustainability … …a catchy word these days! In times of population growth, climate change and environmental challenges, one should think and act in a sustainable way…right? This can mean reducing meat consumption, avoiding plastic bags or cycling instead of using the car: living a sustainable life can look differently on everyone. But still, one thing...
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Greetings readers, a very happy new year. In our third theme session, we are going to discuss about surfaces. The year started with big news on functional surfaces. Scientists of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a new process to achieve functional surfaces, this process so far was irreversible (1). This provides a...
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I was thrilled to be invited writing about the ice theme, specifically about the polar bears. I have always considered polar bears the epitome of ice warriors (been always fascinated by Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ novels). Millions of years of evolution equipped the polar bear to survive the extremely low winter temperatures in the arctic...
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Hello to this week’s frosty article. My motivation for this article is to show you the paradox which can appear when you try to solve a specific problem via biomimetics or biomimicry. Sometimes you can draw parallels between properties of already found solutions to other circumstances. These parallels first appear to not have any connection...
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The theme of ice gave me a hard time finding a topic to write about. Being the botanist in our group, of course I wanted to write about plants, which made me think about the challenges plants are facing with ice or snow. In areas of constant low temperature, vegetation is generally pretty scarce. Of...
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The unbelievable fact that frogs can survive the freezing of their own body led me to writing this article in the theme session of ice. Frogs are cold-blooded organisms and their body temperature conforms with their immediate surrounding. This feature would normally prevent habitations of cold climate due to the risk of lethal freezing. Nevertheless,...
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For the theme of ice, I am going to talk about ice itself and how it occurs in nature. Ice is one of the phases of water, almost one tenth of our planet is covered with it. Two large sheets of ice are covering almost the entire Antarctic and Greenland, this amounts to approximately 15 million square kilometers,...
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