Here's an interesting and wonderfully informative book: "The Gecko's Foot" by Peter Forbes. Ever wonder how a Gecko can climb a smooth sheet of glass or hang upside down on the ceiling? It turns out to have to do with the nano-structure of the foot - the structure of the foot pad at the range of 1 millionth to 1 billionth of a meter.
In fact, it turns out lots of very interesting things happen in nature at that scale - lily pads self-clean and insects fly and mollusks make incredibly durable composite shell structures, and........ And we now have a whole generation of scientists and engineers learning from these natural nano-structures and applying them to commercial products -- self-cleaning glass and paint, new tough fibers, new more efficient architectural forms, etc.
Peter Forbes is a good writer, and this is a very readable book.
Thoughts and observations about the world condition.
See also the annotated book list on the sidebar at the right, as well as the YouTube Lecture list
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