Geckos employ dry adhesion, using a combination of microscopic hairs on their toe pads, as well as other aspects of internal anatomy, to climb vertical walls and run across ceilings, a skill that has long fascinated scientists. In particular, it’s a mystery how some species as much as 100 times heavier than others can use adhesion so effectively.

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Materials scientists seeking to encapsulate droplets of one fluid within another often use molecules like soap or micro- or nano-particles to do it. One distinct way of wrapping a droplet is to use a thin sheet that calls on capillary action to naturally wrap a droplet in a blanket of film, but because it takes some force to bend a sheet around a drop, there were thought to be limits on what can be accomplished by this process.

Now, experimental and theoretical physicists and a polymer scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have teamed up to use much thinner sheets than before to achieve this wrapping process. Thinner, highly-bendable sheets lift these constraints and allow for a new class of wrapped shapes, says experimental physicist Narayanan Menon.

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A revolution is coming in flexible electronic technologies as cheaper, more flexible, organic transistors come on the scene to replace expensive, rigid, silicone-based semiconductors, but not enough is known about how bending in these new thin-film electronic devices will affect their performance, say materials scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Writing in the current issue of Nature Communications, polymer scientists Alejandro Briseño and Alfred Crosby at UMass Amherst, with their doctoral student Marcos Reyes-Martinez, now a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, report results of their recent investigation of how micro-scale wrinkling affects electrical performance in carbon-based, single-crystal semiconductors.

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The animal kingdom is a frequent inspiration for engineers.

Dr. Alfred Crosby, a professor of Polymer Science at The University of Massachusetts Amherst, has helped to create a super-sticky adhesive modeled after the feet of a gecko. Crosby is a materials scientist and engineer interested in the mechanics of soft materials and biological systems and the leader of the initial project that developed Geckskin™.

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