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POPSCaptured in Morning Dew “I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.” – William Shakespeare
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POPSRaindrops on roses The team tried to replicate the effect.They put some polyvinyl alcohol onto rose petals and allowed it to set, then peeled off a thin plastic cast of the petal surface.This film had the same properties as the rose petal:the film could hold droplets of between 3-5 microlitres even when held upside down. It seems that the physical shape of the surface is much more important than any chemical properties of the material in creating 'stickiness',says Ronald Fearing, a biomimetic engineer at the University of California at Berkeley. For a rose, this stickiness might come in handy as reflective water drops that glisten in the Sun might attract pollinating insects. In the lab, such materials might be useful for 'lab on a chip' devices that need to hold and shunt around tiny quantities of liquid without leaking or being contaminated by nearby materials. "These findings present many interesting applications in microfluid handling," says Fearing.
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