Human beings are supposed to have become civilised through the use of tools – Homo faber – and we can craft anything from a microchip to an A380 jumbo jet. But all of these structures are made by bolting things together. Nature makes EVERYTHING by growing them. And yet the shapes nature fashions are often beyond our engineering capacity. Take a bird's flight feather: this is grown in a single piece by squeezing keratin from cells like toothpaste from a tube. So how on earth does it fashion such an intricate shaped object?
Joanna Aizenberg at Harvard has been working for more than 15 years on mimicking nature’s pattern-forming processes using entirely inorganic components. In recent years she has teamed up with L Mahadevan, also at Harvard, a wizard of pattern-forming usually on larger scales.
In their new paper in Science, they, together with two further Harvard scientists, have produced the most elaborate architecture yet – imitating flowers and corals by exploiting a reaction-diffusion process first suggested by Alan Turing over 60 years ago as the key to nature’s pattern forming. They can direct the crystallization of barium chloride and sodium metasilicate by diffusing carbon dioxide through their solutions. This 3 part process can produce an exquisite array of different forms, depending on small changes in the conditions.
Turing’s work on form has recently been taken up in many laboratories but this is the most dramatic use of the principle so far. As the commentary in Science concludes: “More control will undoubtedly lead to structures that may be less artistically pleasing, but more technologically useful.”
W. L. Noorduin, A. Grinthal, L. Mahadevan, J. Aizenberg, ‘‘Rationally Designed Complex, Hierarchical Microarchitectures’. , Science 340, 832 (2013).