2014

Marine biofouling, the process of accumulation of microorganisms, plants, algae and animals on submerged surfaces, is an age-old problem associated with any maritime activity affecting commercial and recreational shipping activities, naval operations...

Porous materials display interesting transport phenomena due to restricted motion of fluids within the nano- to microscale voids. Here, we investigate how liquid wetting in highly ordered inverse opals is affected by anisotropy in pore geometry. We...

Omniphobic coatings are designed to repel a wide range of liquids without leaving stains on the surface. A practical coating should exhibit stable repel- lency, show no interference with color or transparency of the underlying substrate and, ideally, be...

The deep building layouts typical in the U.S. have led to a nearly complete reliance on artificial lighting in standard office buildings. The development of daylight control systems that maximize the penetration and optimize the distribution of natural...

Recently, diffraction elements that reverse the color sequence normally observed in planar diffraction gratings have been found in the wing scales of the butterfly Pierella luna. Here, we describe the creation of an artificial photonic material mimicking...

Thrombosis and biofouling of extracorporeal circuits and indwelling medical devices cause significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. We apply a bioinspired, omniphobic coating to tubing and catheters and show that it completely repels blood and...

Life creates some of its most robust, extreme surface materials not from solids but from liquids: a purely liquid interface, stabilized by underlying nanotexture, makes carnivorous plant leaves ultraslippery, the eye optically perfect and dirt-resistant...

We present a simple one-pot co-assembly method for the synthesis of hierarchically structured pigment particles consisting of silica inverse-opal bricks that are doped with plasmonic absorbers. We study the interplay between the plasmonic and photonic...

We present a reproducible, one-pot colloidal co-assembly approach that results in large-scale, highly ordered porous silica films with embedded, uniformly distributed, accessible gold nanoparticles. The unique coloration of these inverse opal films...

Crack-free inverse opals exhibit a sharply defined threshold wettability for infiltration that has enabled their use as colourimetric indicators for liquid identification. Here we demonstrate direct and continuous photo-tuning of this wetting threshold in...