One of my favorite things is new technologies either derived from or nearly-identical to things found in nature. The most recent such discovery has to do with the wings of insects. Butterflies have inspired materials that repel water due to the physical structure, and – going deeper than that – other insects have recently inspired the design of materials that are innately antiviral and antibacterial. These properties have vast areas of applications from surgical devices and medical implants to creating commonly touched public surfaces (door handles, railings, etc.) that are naturally antibacterial and antiviral. The applications are truly vast.
The first thing to understand is that the mechanisms that make this possible are microscopic. Looking at these wings with your naked eye will reveal nothing of the secrets underlying their incredible function. These structures are so small that they can actually pull bacteria apart when they try to land on them. While the wings of butterflies have structures that allow water to easily glide off (hydrophobic), the wings of cicadas and dragonflies grab the cell walls of bacteria when contact is made and, completely passively and purely due to their physical structure, end up stretching and destroying their cell walls.
A completely mechanical way to provide properties is extremely valuable as this could allow a permanent property to be applied during production that incurs no future costs. Typically, surfaces have required chemical applications to hold antibacterial or hydrophobic properties, which in turn wear out over time and through use and require re-applying the chemical surface to retain the property. Not only have scientists discovered such physical structures on the wings of insects that are able to passively destroy bacteria at the cellular level, but they have improved upon the design and created materials that are capable of destroying virus outer shells as well.
The physical structure on the wing resembles a field of pillars arranged along the surface, but so small that a single bacteria might span 7 of these across one direction. At least, according to the photo at the top of this page (https://www.science.org/content/article/microscopic-pillars-insect-wings-give-bugs-antibacterial-superpower). According to that article, these nano-pillars on cicada wings were observed to kill 98% of bacteria over the course of 3 hours. This is a purely passive event, requiring no stimulation or energy to be input and relying solely on the physical structure of the material.
I’m excited by the prospects of this technology reaching widespread usage. If humanity’s population keeps growing and we live in more and more condensed areas the likelihood of a pandemic will increase. If public spaces or products that can contribute to the spread of germs are, by design, antibacterial and antiviral, I imagine we would cut our risk of spreading disease down by a lot.
Anyway, I just read about this the other day and it reminded me how awesome it is when we find ideas for new technologies from examples in nature. Nature got pretty good at a lot of stuff; I have a feeling there are properties we have yet to discover in nature that we didn’t even know could exist.
I’m looking forward to finding more examples.
Rich Mind 