White Roman Goose Feather-Inspired Unidirectionally Inclined Conical Structure Arrays for Switchable Anisotropic Self-Cleaning.

White Roman goose ( ) feathers, comprised of oriented conical barbules, are coated with gland-secreted preening oils to maintain a long-term nonwetting performance for surface swimming. The geese are accustomed to combing their plumages with flat bills in case they are contaminated with oleophilic substances, during which the amphiphilic saliva spread over the barbules greatly impairs their surface hydrophobicities and allows the trapped contaminants to be anisotropically self-cleaned by water flows. Particularly, the superhydrophobic behaviors of the goose feathers are recovered as well.

Single-Step Fabrication of Longtail Glasswing Butterfly-Inspired Omnidirectional Antireflective Structures.

Most bio-inspired antireflective nanostructures are extremely vulnerable and suffer from complicated lithography-based fabrication procedures. To address the issues, we report a scalable and simple non-lithography-based approach to engineer robust antireflective structures, inspired by the longtail glasswing butterfly, in a single step. The resulting two-dimensional randomly arranged 80/130/180 nm silica colloids, partially embedded in a polymeric matrix, generate a gradual refractive index transition at the air/substrate interface to suppress light reflection.

Omnidirectional / Unidirectional Antireflection-Switchable Structures Inspired by Dragonfly Wings.

Randomly arranged irregular inclined conical structure-covered dragonfly wings, distinguished from periodic conical structure-covered cicada wings, are with high optical transparency for wide viewing angles. Bioinspired by the antireflective structures, we develop a colloidal lithography approach for engineering randomly arranged irregular conical structures with shape memory polymer-based tips. The structures establish a gradual refractive index transition to suppresses optical reflection in the visible spectrum.

Identification and characterisation of the putative phage-related endolysins through full genome sequence analysis in Acinetobacter baumannii ATCC 17978.

Acinetobacter baumannii has recently emerged as a major cause of healthcare-associated infections owing to an increase in its antimicrobial resistance to virtually all available drugs. The ability of endolysins (lysozymes) to digest cell walls when applied exogenously to bacterial cells has enabled their use as novel antibacterials. In order to utilise endolysins as a therapeutic alternative to antibiotics, we surveyed the genome sequence of A.