Cactus as a fog collector

The first thing that everybody notices about the cactus is that it does not have any leaves but has spines, needle-like shaped features, on its skin. Depending on the cactus type, these spines can be arranged in many ways and have different shapes.
Cacti survive in difficult conditions of heat and dryness. They reduce water loss by having spines instead of leaves, which significantly reduces the surface area, and by having a waxy coating on the body. Moreover, cacti can collect water in many different ways. Like most plants, the cactus has roots, which are spread over a large area and placed close to the soil surface to take advantage of light rains. The water, which is taken in through the roots, is stored in the spongy or hollow stems of the cactus. Their waxy-skinned bodies hold moisture very efficiently as it contains the slow evaporation stomata with microscopic pores on the surface, which can open and close in the right moment in order to prevent air and water escaping from the cactus. The outer skin of the cactus is often ribbed, like an accordion. They expand as they fill up with water and fold together as the water in the stem is used up. Additionally, cacti have the ability to absorb water through their outer skin, allowing them to capture moisture in the air. The surface covered by spines helps to pick up water as it works as drip-tip from fog, dew or light rain. The dense needle-like surface can trap fog droplets, and shed them on the ground below, which is absorbed then by roots and later transported into their spongy interior tissue. Now one can see that the function of spines is not only protection against animals and sunlight (giving shadow). If you check the cactus structure under a microscope you see that spines are not smooth, they have some roughness or channels to aid in trapping water which can be slowly absorbed by the cactus skin, specifically through the epidermis (upper part of a skin).

The cactus in my office - Rebuta Muscula, grey images represent the surface of cacti’ spikes.

The collection of water by cacti has been an inspiration for people. Water from fog can be collected via mesh of wires/fibres or fabric, which is called a fog fence or fog collector. The fog collector should face the prevailing winds so the droplet can settle on a mesh and wind just flows around it. Droplets slowly coalesce and run to the bottom of the mesh, where they are collected. A similar thing happens with dew, which is a process known as condensation. In nature, atmospheric water vapour condenses on cold surfaces into droplets of liquid water on plant leaves, blades of grass or spider webs as you can see in the picture below.

Water collected by a spider web in the mountains surrounding Santa Barbara in California, August 2005.

In principle the spider web in nature works like the man-made fog collector here. If you want to see in detail how this brilliant idea works, please see the movie from FogQuest:

Skin Inspiration

Very often when we think about skin first thing that comes to mind is skin aging and wrinkles due to degradation of the collagen. Other example of wrinkles is when we keep our finger in water for too long. The outer layer of skin starts to absorb water and extends, resulting in a larger surface area and causing it to wrinkle.

Animal’s skin has often wrinkles or other features design for surviving in their natural environment. One of the examples is skin of shark, which has structure shaped like grooved and curved teeth with some cavities and has texture of sandpaper. The tooth-like structure is called dermal denticles or placoid scales. This structure enables sharks to swim faster and more efficiently because the friction of the water flowing along their body is reduced by channelling into grooves and cavities at their skin. Sharks can speed up to 50 km/h. Their skin has been already an inspiration for aerodynamic plains, cars and swimsuits. Additionally, the same surface protect sharks from adhering sea plants and organisms. It is one of the examples of self cleaning surfaces we can find in nature. The most known self cleaning surface is lotus leaf.

Picture of shark taken in the Oceanografic part of The City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, October 2010.

The inspiration for protective clothing is for example crocodile skin, which is able to deflect spears, arrows, knifes and sometimes even bullets. The reason of the high strength of crocodile skin is not only the thickness but collagen proteins fibres. The collagen fibres are the reinforcement parts of skin scales. In similar way rugged crocodiles and sharks skins have cavities, but for crocodiles the cavities are used to push blood through the scales to absorb the heat. Interestingly, the examples of crocodile structure can be found  in man-made material such as fibreglass, which is commonly used in automotive industry.

Pictures of crocodiles taken in the The Madras Crocodile Bank Trust in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, March 2008.

The evolution managed to come up with many more ingenious solutions. Researchers and engineers try to learn from the nature and biomimic some ideas but we need to keep in mind one thing that it was for nature very long creation process taking billions of years.

Why spider web is one of the toughest materials?

Toughness is the measurement of the material resistance to breakage. 

The structure of every material at micro- and nanoscale influences its mechanical properties.

What is so special in spider web at the nanoscale?

Spider web is made of protein based silk fibres. Proteins are resilient (stretchy) and give elasticity to the material design. Silk fibres ranging from 1 to 10 microns contain oriented nanofibrils with a size of 100-200 nm and elongated tubular cavities. Those vacuoles, called canaliculi, control crack propagation during the process of fibres stretching. Consequently, the spider webs have huge strain to failure, which increases material toughness.

As far as a material design is considered, natural silk offers very attractive balance of toughness and stiffness together with viscoelastic properties. The material properties are controlled by molecular bonding between characteristic groups of atoms; in silk it is a combination of hydrogen bonding between peptide segments and van der Waal’s forces.

Concluding, in order to catch a few insects spiders need to make a web made out of silk, which is three times stronger than steel. Spider’s life must be then tough :)

Scanning electron microscopy image of silk fibres from spider web taken from Miriam’s garden.

Nano musical instruments

This week I was inspired by Asa showing me a short article in the newspaper about a nano musical instrument. A group from Twente University (MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology) in the Netherlands claims to have created the first nano musical instrument that produces audible tones.The instrument itself is up to 1 millimetre long and contains springs measuring a tenth of the thickness of a human hair. The sound is created by vibration of the strings, the plucking of which is controlled by a mass spring system.[1] Additionally, comb drives are used to control the tuning of the comb by changing, for instance, the number of comb teeth or the gap between them.

I decided to investigate whether there are any other nano musical instruments, excluding the iPod nano :) I have found that there is a nanoguitar, which was made in 1997 by researches from Cornell University. The 10 microns long guitar has 6 strings, each about 50 nm and is carved out of crystalline silicon using high-voltage electron beam lithography. The strings can only be plucked when an atomic force microscope is used, which contains a nanosized tip. Unfortunately, this nanoguitar works in an inaudible frequency.[2] In 2004 another study, this time from IBM, made the nanoguitar playable with a focused laser beam, which hits the string, makes them vibrate and creates interference patterns in the light reflected back. The vibrating frequency created on the strings is much higher than in normal guitars so no one can hear it.[3]

To summarize, the only nano musical concerts ever performed have been in the Netherlands.

References:

1. http://www.utwente.nl/organization/stories/muziek-maken-op-de-micrometer

2. http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/july97/guitar.ltb.html

3. “Nanoguitar is music to engineers' ears”, Futurist, 28(2), 12-13, Mar-Apr 2004

What is “nano”?

Before writing about nanotechnology and nanomaterials I need to explain:
What is “nano”?

My friend Chris always says: do not think that iPod nano is a really nano sized device :)

Then, how big is one nanometer?

1 nanometer (nm) is 1 billionth of a meter (m)

In other words:
One nanometer is to a tennis ball what a tennis ball is to the Earth

The start

Simply, it is going to be a curiosity driven blog.

I started to write this blog to learn how important “nano” is for nature and for us and why.
There are at least a few question to answer, such as:
Where all small features can be found and what are their functions?
Are the nano-sized materials different than the materials visible with naked eye?
What do make nanomaterials special?
.....