With the beginning of the year 2008, the iMechanica journal club moves to two topics per month.  This first topic will be highlighted here for 1-14 January, with the next topic starting on 15 January. 

There has been much recent buzz about biology and nature, and about materials and structures that are “biomimetic” or “bio-inspired”.  A key distinction here, when compared with fields like tissue engineering, is that although information is obtained from natural objects, including biological tissues, the end-applications are industrial and not necessarily biomedical.