Professor Robert Full is used to fielding bizarre calls: It might be the Department of Defense on the line inquiring about swimming robots, or Pixar animators wondering precisely how their cartoon critters should move. Recently a fashion design house phoned, interested in crafting haute couture fabric a customer could sculpt to the curves of her body and simply peel off. And the president of a men's hair club wondered if it were possible to create a toupee adhesive that could withstand gale-force winds. They call because Full and his colleagues spend their time investigating how plants and animals solve similar problems and how to borrow a bit from nature's nearly 4 billion years of research and development.

Increasingly engineers, architects, psychologists, and computer scientists are teaming with biologists to pursue what Full calls "bio-inspiration" and others tag with a trendier name, "biomimicry." Whatever you call it, it is yielding some of the world's quirkiest and most creatively cutting-edge inventions. The opening of a new campus lab devoted to such research solidifies Berkeley's place among a handful of universities at the forefront of the field.

Following bio-inspiration, for example, Cal researchers are crafting a superior anti-sliding adhesive patterned after the teensy toe hairs of the gravity-defying gecko. This lizard is blessed with an uncanny ability to scamper up slick walls and dangle from ceilings by a single toe—and it can continue to do so underwater.

It isn't suction or sticky toe jam that enables such gymnastics. Electron microscope inspection reveals that the gecko possesses about half a million bristles on each foot, terminating in a horrid case of split ends: hundreds of spatulae per bristle. This natural design gives a single gecko about a billion points of contact, maximizing a molecular phenomenon called van der Waals force—the same minuscule pull that sticks molecules together, and keeps, for example, water from spilling all over the place.

By replicating key features of the gecko's toes, as identified by Full and Kellar Autumn (who is now a professor at Lewis and Clark College), Berkeley electrical engineering professor Ron Fearing and his team are producing a new generation of microfiber adhesives that attach with incredible force, yet detach with ease. These adhesives could be used for automobile tires with unprecedented traction, bandages that could be applied directly over burns and lift off ouchlessly, or robots that can climb up slick walls. They could revolutionize soccer by creating the greatest goalie gloves—and perhaps even produce human climbing gear. Not to mention enabling clingy designer gowns and the toughest toupee glue ever known to man.

Gecko adhesive is just one of several bio-inspiration projects underway. Researchers are replicating the locomotive abilities of insects, fish, and crabs to design and build flying and swimming robots for rescue and reconnaissance missions. Mechanical engineering graduate Marcus Rosenthal, whose bio-inspiration studies led him to co-found the company Artificial Muscle, is borrowing from nature to construct, among many other things, small, portable infusion pumps that could replace IVs, happily shortening hospital stays.

In fact, the world is percolating with bio-inspiration. Sto markets a water-repellent and self-cleaning exterior paint that mimics the incredibly rough microstructure of the seemingly smooth lotus—renowned for its ability to remain pristine in the muddiest water. Volvo developed an anti-collision system modeled on how locusts swarm without smashing into each other. Cambridge Biostability devised a method of storing vaccines in Third World locales that mimics the resurrection fern, eliminating the need for refrigeration and for booster shots.

page 1 | 4