cockles and mussels

... not only share the title of a folk song, they are also both bivalves, which is the topic of my latest feature. Considering that bivalves including mussels, clams, scallops, oysters and such like are omnipresent in cultural history, we still know surprisingly little about some important aspects of their biology. Accordingly, I have rounded up some things we are still learning from them, from underwater adhesion through to mirror optics.

The resulting feature is out now:

Learning from bivalves

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 24, 18. December 2023, Pages R1263-R1265

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

I wrote a few lines about Botticelli's very famous painting The birth of Venus but didn't include a picture of it in the article, so I'm showing it here instead. Image: Wikipedia

becoming a plant

Today's issue of Current Biology has a special section called

The making of a plant

with lots of fascinating stuff on everything plant related from cell biology to agriculture.

My contribution is a feature rounding up various ways in which mimicking plants can be useful for us, from architecture through to ecology and behaviour of pollinators:

Reinventing the plant

Current Biology Volume 27, Issue 17, 11 September 2017, Pages R855–R858

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

a robot's life for me

there are exciting things going on in the fields of robotics, biomimetics, and biohybrids, but for some reason researchers in these fields tend to communicate their important results via conference proceedings rather than high profile journals. So when I went to the conference Living Machines at London in July, I realised that there are lots of things that hadn't shown up in the pages of Nature and Science. I haven't really looked at these issues since publishing "Biotronik" ten years ago - a book in German which looked at biohybrids and the interface between biology and electronics.

Trying to make up for lost time, I wrote a feature about these things, which is out today in Current Biology:

Towards living machines

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 18, R821-R823, 23 September 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.004

Free access to full text and PDF download.

Vicky Vouloutsi from Barcelona held an intriguing talk about programming social behaviour on the established android system iCub (I could have benefited from such programming in my early life too!), so I took a snap of her and her pet:

sticky stuff

Earlier this year, I reviewed a book about biological adhesives and was intrigued by the large diversity of interesting materials that haven't been investigaten in much detail yet. I've further explored this field in a feature article which is out in this month's issue of Chemistry World:

Getting stuck in
Chemistry World 8, no. 12, pp 52-55

restricted access

sticky stuff

My long essay review of the monograph

Biological Adhesive Systems: From nature to technical applications
By Janek von Byern, Ingo Grunwald (eds.)

is in this week's issue of Chemistry & Industry (No. 11), page 27. It's premium content, I'm afraid, so only the lucky few with a subscription or institutional access can read it online here. For the rest of us, here's a snippet describing the most entertaining part of the book:

The prize for the most accessible chapter goes to the Australian frogs of the genus Notaden. Apparently these creatures are so well-rounded that they can’t cling on to each other with their short limbs during mating. Which is why they need glue, literally, in order to stick together while they are exchanging body liquids. The author tested the adhesive power of the frog secretions by sticking two full, cold and humid beer cans together, lengthwise in one experiment and bottom to top in another.

biotemplating

I've reviewed a book about biotemplating in this week's issue of Chemistry & Industry, which is now online here (same issue which has my astrobiology story on the cover).

People with institutional access (and SCI members) can access the review here.

For everybody else, here's a snippet explaining what biotemplating is all about:

There is, however, a third way of creating nanoscale structures, one which borrows more from Nature than just the principles of molecular assembly. In biotemplating, the existing nanostructures of organisms are used as templates on which to deposit thin layers of non-natural materials. This process can lead to architectures consisting of materials with useful properties, such as semiconductors, while benefiting from Nature’s knack for extremely subtle structures.

Designs on Nature
Chemistry & Industry Issue 6 (22nd March 2010), p

in praise of sea cucumbers

I have to admit that I wasn't aware of the amazing abilities of sea cucumbers until this story came up. Their skin is normally flexible, but in response to a stimulus it can get very stiff within a second.* Recent findings suggest it's the interaction between collagen fibres that is switched on and off.

Researchers in the US have now succeeded in mimicking this behaviour in a new material. Read my news story here (free access).


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* Chinese traditional medicine has drawn the obvious conclusion from this and uses dried sea cucumber as an aphrodisiac! (according to the Wikipedia entry)