The story behind one of the most common household products goes like this. Swiss inventor George de Mestral was an avid hiker who grew tired of the plant burrs that stuck to his wool pants and his shaggy dog's coat. One day in 1948, after a hike through France's Jura Mountains, he decided to examine the tiny tormentors further.

He noticed that the burrs contained hundreds of tiny hooks that grabbed clothing fibers or anything else they touched. It gave de Mestral an idea and in 1951, he patented his new invention: Velcro.

A similar story of discovery goes like this. A colleague of Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Robert Shadwick stumbled across sea snail egg capsules on a walk along a Delaware beach with his young son. The friend, a biochemist named Herb Waite, noticed how particularly elastic the capsules were when his son stretched them. He suggested that Shadwick figure out what made them so elastic yet so strong.

Shadwick, a marine biologist in the Marine Biology Research Division, assigned the project to graduate student Scott Rapoport, who found that Waite's observations were correct. The capsules could be stretched like a piece of taffy, but unlike the candy, would revert to their original shape no matter how many times they were pulled. The identification and synthetic production of such a substance could lead to a variety of applications.

The development of products from those egg capsules is still a long way off, but Rapoport's research, as well as that of Scripps marine biologist Mark Hildebrand, is evidence that even the most modest creatures have mechanical secrets worth investigating. A protein that the sea snail produces for its eggs could influence the prosthetic implant of the future, and the shells of the tiny plankton Hildebrand studies could be the template for optical circuitry vastly more efficient than the electric or glass components we use now. The quest to understand nature's designs has taken both researchers into the growing field of biomimicry.

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