THE GECKO’S FOOT
Book ID/图书代码： 06040005B05220
English Summary/英文概要： A cutting-edge science book in the style of FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM and CHAOS from an exciting and accessible new voice in popular science writing. Bio-inspiration is the new engineering. Instead of - in its crudest terms - welding large piece of hard ’dry’ right-angled metal together scientists, architects and engineers are looking at imitating (or mimicking) nature by manufacturing ’wet’ materials such as spider silk or the surface of the gecko’s foot. The amazing power of the gecko’s foot has long been known - it can climb a vertical glass wall and even walk upside down on the ceiling - but nothing could be done with it because its mechanism was beyond the power of optical microscopes. Recently though the secret of the gecko’s foot has been solved by a team of scientists in Portland, Oregon who have established that the mechanism really is dry, and that is does not involve suction, capillary action or anything else the lay person might imagine. Each foot has iGBP million bristles and each bristle ramifies into hundreds of finer spatula-shaped projections. The fine scale of the gecko’s foot is beyond the capacity of conventional microengineering but a team of nanotechnologists have already made a good initial approximation. The gecko’s foot is just one of many examples of this new ’smart’ science. In Peter Forbes’ accessible and engaging book we also discover, amongst other things, how George de Mestral’s brush with the spiny fruits of the cocklebur inspired him to invent Velcro; how the shape of leaves opening from a bud has inspired the design of solar-powered satellites; how scientists are trying to mimic the self-cleaning leaves of the Scared Lotus plant to create the first self-cleaning pane of glass; and the parallels between cantilever bridges and the spines of large mammals such as the bison. The new ’smart’ science of Bio-inspiration is going to produce a plethora of products over the next decades that will transform our lives, and force us to look at the world in a completely new way. It is science we will be reading about in our papers very soon; it is the science of tomorrow’s world.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 生态激励学是一门新型的工程学：是大自然本身的纳米技术。科学家、建筑师和工程师运用大自然在经历了几百万年进化之后演化出的如火纯清的自我组装的技术建造出了结构复杂的建筑物。
科学家正想尽办法研制和壁虎脚趾有一样惊人粘性的材质，这就是一个很好的例子。在Peter Forbes的这部作品中，我们还了解到乔治迈斯楚如何在与苍耳属植物的刺状果实擦边而过后得到启发，发明了钩和圈环式拉链；从张开的叶子，昆虫的翅膀以及太阳能嵌板之间到底看出有什么相识的折纸花样；高贵的睡莲植物的叶瓣有自洁功能，那它又是怎样启发科学家发明出具有自我清洗能力的物体表面；光子晶体----算得上是自晶体管诞生以来最重要的革新-----其实是海底神灵阿芙罗狄蒂在远古时代的发明。
其实生态激励学这门新生的智慧学科将会在未来的几十年里开发出无数可以改变我们生活的产品，它也迫使我们重新思考这个世界。这门科学不久就会出现在我们的论文中，这是一个未来世界的科学。
Awards/获奖情况：
About the Author/作者介绍： Peter Forbes为《卫报》写了一系列以生态激励为主题的文章，还在《卫报》出版的Frontiers 03中写了一个章节。他编辑了“Scanning the Century:The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry ”,并担任了普利摩利维斯的〈寻根记〉的翻译。从1986年到2002他负责编辑 《诗歌评论》。
Format:MANUSCRIPT
Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE
Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：SOLD(非我们代理）
Sales in other countries/其他国家销售情况：
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