Micro-revolutions

Now he has done so. The Pouncer, a hundred-and-forty-five-pound edible glider, with a ten-foot wingspan, is designed to be released from a cargo plane as far as sixty miles from its target. The fuselage is packed with grains; the Pouncer’s entire menu is customizable to cultural tastes and sensitivities. According to Gifford, in a complex humanitarian emergency—such as an earthquake in a mountainous area, with many villages but no usable roads—a plane could carry several hundred Pouncers, each programmed with different landing coördinates. The Pouncer has no engine, but its navigation system can adjust the wings to guide it to within twenty-three feet of its target.

The frame has some wooden components, but Gifford intends eventually to replace them with food. “Some parts can be made with a hard-baked, flour-based material that can be soaked in water and added to a meal,” he said. “My wife doesn’t like this, but I wander the supermarket aisles, playing with food, testing for tensile strength.” Dried, vacuum-packed meats show promise as landing gear.

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Surgical Slime

Arion fuscus is an orange-brown slug around the size of your pinkie. It moves too slowly to run from predators; instead, when threatened, it slimes itself, secreting a super-sticky glue that renders it immovable and unappetizing. To most of us, this is gross, but to researchers in biomimetics—the growing field at the intersection of biology and engineering—it’s a vision of the future.

Earlier this year, a team of scientists working in the lab of David J. Mooney, at Harvard, analyzed the slime and repurposed it for clinical use inside the body, where it can function as a surgical adhesive. Unlike the surgical glue doctors use today, the team’s slug-inspired glue is nontoxic to cells and adheres to wet surfaces as well as dry ones. It could be used to close an internal incision, or to seal a hole in a heart.

In a sense, biomimetics is nothing new: in 1941, the Swiss engineer George de Mestral got the idea for Velcro by examining, under a microscope, a burr that had got caught in his dog’s fur. But, as our understanding of the natural world has deepened, the potential of biomimicry has expanded. Our own bodies are full of ingenious solutions created through evolution; so are the bodies of other living things. Increasingly, we are borrowing them.

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A Scarf Darkly

The promise of black visibility has always been twisted. Mechanisms of seeing are also mechanisms of intruding, policing, controlling. But Hyphen-Labs, a collective of women technologists of color, has developed an ingenious workaround—a scarf that occludes the wearer’s face, but only selectively. To the human eye, the scarf adorns; to a computer’s eye, it obscures, because of a camouflage pattern called HyperFace printed on the fabric. HyperFace, which was developed by the designer Adam Harvey, is a mess of pixelated blotches, out of which emerge twelve hundred shapes that are almost like faces, but not quite. This jumble of visual data overloads facial-recognition algorithms.

The scarf is part of the Hyphen-Labs NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism project. (Other creations also reimagine the function of iconic objects of black style: they’ve designed door-knocker earrings that double as cameras, and a virtual-reality salon, in which a genderless neurocosmetologist tends to your hair.) So-called covert fashion, designed to evade surveillance, has become a niche field, and its products can feel both hysterical and cold, conceptually aloof from the physicality of the body they are meant to protect. But what Hyper-Labs calls the “afrocentric countersurveillance aesthetic” of the invisible scarf seems more optimistic, and rooted in earlier innovation. Eighteenth-century tignon laws in Louisiana made it illegal for women of color to go out without head scarves. The wearers turned a sign of subjugation into something alluring. Hyphen-Labs’ technologists show similar dexterity. The scarf floats a way of being in public, in private.

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A Web of Nerves

Down the hallway on the first floor of Europe’s largest hospital, the Medical University of Vienna, lies a door marked “Spinnenraum,” or “Spider Room.” Behind it live twenty-one Tanzanian golden orb-weaver spiders. Once a week, the female spiders are “milked”: more than two hundred metres (or six hundred and fifty-six feet) of dragline silk—the kind a spider uses to suspend itself in the air—can be wound out of the abdominal glands in fifteen minutes, using a mechanical bobbin. Then the spiders are fed an extra ration of crickets, and their silk is sterilized, bundled into eight-inch-long cables, and used to bridge the gap between damaged nerve cells in animals. Within months, new cells proliferate along the trellis provided by the silk, which dissolves when its work is done, leaving a functioning nerve.

Christine Radtke, the German reconstructive surgeon who has spent the past ten years developing this technique, has already succeeded in restoring lost sensation and movement in the legs of sheep and monkeys. She hopes to be able to start human clinical trials next year, with the idea that her method could soon become a standard therapy for the hundreds of thousands of patients who sustain otherwise irreparable nerve damage. Silk from her spiders is more tear-resistant than nylon, four times as elastic as steel, and stronger than Kevlar. More important, it is the first and only known synthetic conduit for regrowing nerves that does not trigger an immune reaction, allergies, or scar tissue. Radtke calls it “the Holy Grail of nerve regeneration.”

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Backtracker

Along the fertile banks of Northern Virginia’s Potomac River, at a wooded biomedical-research complex, a dragonfly is wearing a backpack. A few years ago, a neuroscientist named Anthony Leonardo invented the device to record the activity of dragonflies’ brain cells as they hunt fruit flies. Each insect is outfitted with a circuit board, a custom computer chip, “a few other electronic parts,” and an antenna the width of a human hair, Leonardo told me. He is one of a growing number of researchers strapping ever-tinier backpacks onto ever-tinier creatures in order to study their behavior and movement.

Until recently, for instance, G.P.S. tags and radio transmitters were far too heavy for migratory songbirds to carry. (Many species weigh little more than two quarters.) Ornithologists hope that the latest backpacks—secured with leg-loop harnesses high on birds’ back feathers, and weighing no more than a raisin—will help them study where these birds fly every winter, the distances they cover, and the speed they travel. Such information might explain why songbird populations have collapsed over the past fifty years.

Insect backpacks are still rare, but honeybees, which have also been mysteriously dying in the past decade, are now being outfitted with minuscule radio transmitters, and some cockroaches are being covered in electrodes that can partly control their motion. The dragonfly backpack, at forty milligrams, is the smallest yet. It has allowed Leonardo to identify specific brain cells that steer the insect as it hunts prey. Next he wants to turn his bionic dragonflies into hybrid drones—what a collaborator describes as “a totally new kind of micro aerial vehicle that’s smaller, lighter, and stealthier than anything else that’s man-made.”

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Ars Brevis

One way to examine the world is to change its scale. We use microscopes to enlarge the planet’s tiniest stuff; the sculptor Takahiro Iwasaki works in the opposite way, reducing familiar, monumental structures to miniature proportions, using humble, everyday materials, the better to make us look at them anew. He constructs tiny transmission towers from the bristles of toothbrushes and nail-scrubbers, and weaves gossamer cranes from sock thread. A bubble-gum-pink radio tower stands over the umbilical length of shoelace it emerged from, exquisite in its lifelike precision and troubling in its tininess; a good sneeze, it seems, could bring it crashing down. Iwasaki was born in Hiroshima, thirty years after the city was razed by the atomic bomb. An awareness of the brutality of industrial progress, and of the fragility of human life and civilization, is his inheritance; his artist’s gift is to transmit to us, with fanciful delicacy, the terrible beauty of the transient world we have built.

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Shapeshifter

If the chameleon is the definition of mimicry, the octopus is its embodiment. In an instant, the animal can change its shape and the color and texture of its skin to resemble nearly anything: a flatfish, a crab, a block of coral, a frond of algae; surely, it could mimic a chameleon if it needed. Now humans are imitating the octopus.

In October, two researchers—James Pikul, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Robert Shepherd, of Cornell University—announced the invention of a silicone skin that can change to resemble its surroundings. Octopus skin’s transmutability comes from tiny muscle units, called papillae, that rapidly swell to form lumps and spurs. Pikul and Shepherd used tiny balloons. They created sheets of silicone with air pockets that are framed by circles of fibre mesh; the mesh gives the bubbles particular shapes when inflated. (Picture one of those latex Obie dolls whose eyes pop out when you squeeze it.) The research was funded by the Department of Defense, presumably with camouflage in mind, and so far the ruse is limited to predefined shapes: rounded stones, spiral-leaved succulents. The octopus, with its near-infinite repertoire, is still eight steps ahead.

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Living Colors

As bacteria go, Streptomyces is pretty special. It produces two-thirds of the world’s antibiotics and—to the delight of the co-founders of Pili, a French biotech startup—one strain, in particular, naturally secretes a blue pigment that can be used to create dyes. In 2012, two of Pili’s co-founders, a synthetic biologist named Thomas Landrain and a designer, Marie-Sarah Adenis, realized that they could grow bacteria that produced natural inks and dyes. When these bacteria are fed sugar, they can synthesize color molecules through fermentation—just like microorganisms such as yeast that have been used to produce alcohol for centuries. The Pili founders reasoned that they could use bacteria instead of yeast to brew dyes, perfecting a filtration process that results in a non-toxic and biodegradable ink prototype that can be used in pens or everyday printers. (They’ve since partnered with the pen manufacturer Bic.)

This is no small breakthrough, considering that the fashion industry is one of the world’s biggest polluters, largely because of the chemicals used in dyeing textiles. Each year, as much as two hundred tons of dyes, mostly petrochemicals, are dumped into waterways, killing aquatic life and poisoning potable water sources and farmland with carcinogens and other hormone-disruptors. But Streptomyces could provide a solution.

Now Pili’s team of chemists, biologists, engineers, and designers is cultivating the “Pili microbe palette,” a collection of microorganisms that have been engineered to produce pigments in a variety of colors. Pili uses bioreactors, similar to the fermentation tanks in breweries, to produce colorants on an industrial scale. The opaque yellow of a ripe banana is the easiest to produce, and ultramarine blue is the hardest. The most beautiful part, though, is knowing that all the colors are green.

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Reproduction in a Bag

In 1970, in “The Dialectic of Sex,” twenty-five-year-old Shulamith Firestone argued for a seizure of the means of reproduction. The “freeing of women from the tyranny of their biology by any means available,” she wrote—in other words, by the invention of artificial wombs—is the only way that women would ever cease to be second-class citizens. Forty-seven years later, ectogenesis looms. Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have developed the Biobag, an incubator intended to improve survival rates for premature babies, which has already been effective for premature lambs. At the equivalent of twenty-three weeks for a human fetus, lambs were encased in the Biobag: the oldest of these animal subjects is now a year old. The Biobag isn’t ready for human use yet, and it’s not designed to gestate an embryo through early development, but we’re getting ever closer to Firestone’s feminist dream.

Ben Taub, Joshua Rothman, Doreen St. Félix, Nicola Twilley, Carolyn Kormann, Alexandra Schwartz, Alan Burdick, Monica Racic, Jia Tolentino