A good friend of mine emailed me these and they are just too intense not to share.

It appears there are some specs and some actual photographs mixed in here, but the description is where the SLAM happens. Love it when my brain hurts. Hurts so good.

Biomimicry has been an interest of mine for a while, particularly in architecture. I suppose it’s funny for an organic creature (myself) to try and mimic other organic things, but once I surround myself with petrochemicals it doesn’t seem so silly to run away into the woods, ripping my shirt off and howling at the moon. Anyway there are some incredible images here, howling or not.

“Tiny plastic fibers, each with a diameter of 250 nanometers, spontaneously wrapped around a plastic ball when they were immersed in an evaporating liquid, demonstrating a new way of controlling the self-assembly of polymer hairs. The image was produced with a scanning electronic microscope and was digitally enhanced for color.”

Photo: Sung Hoon Kang, Boaz Pokroy and Joanna Aizenberg

“‘Back to the Future’ illustrates the concept of biomimetism by combining a scanning electron microscope image of fan-shaped colonies of diatoms in the genus Licmophora and a 3D computational drawing of a solar panel prototype inspired by them.”

Photo: Mario De Stefano, Antonia Auletta and Carla Langella

“Large scale templates from simulations of networking endothelial cells cultured on a 3D matrix were overlaid with more than 75,000 interconnected zip ties to show the complexity of an organic datascape and process.”

Photo: Peter Lloyd Jones, Andrew Lucia, Annette Fierro and Jenny E. Sabin

Rest of set, via NYT Science, and my friend, Robin