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The Gecko's Foot - How Scientists are Taking a Leaf from Nature's Book (Paperback)
Loot Price: R232
Discovery Miles 2 320
You Save: R27
(10%)
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The Gecko's Foot - How Scientists are Taking a Leaf from Nature's Book (Paperback)
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List price R259
Loot Price R232
Discovery Miles 2 320
You Save R27 (10%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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A cutting-edge science book in the style of 'Fermat's Last Theorem'
and 'Chaos' from an exciting and accessible new voice in popular
science writing. Bio-inspiration 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 gecko's foot. The amazing
power of the gecko's 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 spatula-shaped projections. The
fine scale of the gecko's foot is beyond the capacity of
conventional microengineering, but a team of nanotechnologists have
already made a good initial approximation. The gecko's foot is just
one of many examples of this new 'smart' science. We also discover,
amongst other things, how George de Mestral's 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
solar-powered satellites; and the parallels between cantilever
bridges and the spines of large mammals such as the bison. The new
'smart' science of Bio-inspiration 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 tomorrow's world.
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