Climbing with adhesion
Mark Cutkosky is Fletcher Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. Here he discusses climbing robots and how they can take their cue from nature.
More details | Watch nowPhysical perspective on cytoplasmic streaming
Professor Ray Goldstein FRS is the Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems at the University of Cambridge. Here he describes a biological example of topological inversion, with relevance to engineering problems in human technology.
More details | Watch nowBioinspired genotype–phenotype linkages
Florian Hollfelder is based in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in mechanism in chemistry and biology. Here he describes using principles of natural selection to make functional proteins.
More details | Watch nowBiomimetic adhesive microstructures
Stanislav Gorb is Professor of Zoology at the University of Kiel, Germany, with an interest in functional morphology and biomechanics. Here he discusses clustering as a form of self-assembly, and applications in adhesion.
More details | Watch nowBioinspired membrane-based systems
Directrice de Recherche Patricia Bassereau, Institut Curie Centre de Recherche Laboratorie Physico-Chimie, France, speaks on bioinspired membrane-based systems for a physical approach of cell organization and dynamics: usefulness and limitations.
More details | Watch nowCrystals: animal, vegetable or mineral?
Stephen Hyde is Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and the Research School of Physics and Engineering at the Australian National University in Canberra. Taking the popular children's game as a starting point, he asks whether crystalli....
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Yuru Deng is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore with a background in dentistry. Here she discusses the enigmatic functions of biological cubic membranes.
More details | Watch nowBioinspiration: something for everyone
George Whitesides is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. Best-known for his work in NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly and nanotechnology, here he introduces sof....
More details | Watch nowCuckoos and their victims
The sight of a little warbler feeding an enormous cuckoo chick has astonished observers since ancient times. It was once thought that cuckoos were unable to raise their own young because of defective anatomy and behaviour, and so other birds were onl....
More details | Watch nowBacterial cell walls, antibiotics and the origins of life
The cell wall is a crucial structure found in almost all bacteria. It is the target for our best antibiotics and fragments of the wall trigger powerful innate immune responses against infection. Surprisingly, many bacteria can switch almost effortl....
More details | Watch nowTackling the great challenges of the 21st century
Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society and Lord Stern, President of the British Academy, discussed the new opportunities – and need – for collaboration between the traditional academic disciplines to respond to the big issues of our time,....
More details | Watch nowEbola: inside an epidemic
Find out what we have learnt from the outbreak so far (March 2015) and what is being done to ensure continued resilience to epidemic scenarios.
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