People have been lifting ideas from Mother Nature for decades. Velcro was inspired by the hooked barbs of thistle, and the first highway reflectors were made to mimic cat eyes. But today, the science of copying nature, a field known as biomimetics, is a billion-dollar industry. Here are some of our favorite technologies that came in from the wild.

1. Sharkskin—The Latest Craze in Catheters

Hospitals are constantly worried about germs. No matter how often doctors and nurses wash their hands, they inadvertently spread bacteria and viruses from one patient to the next. In fact, as many as 100,000 Americans die each year from infections they pick up in hospitals. Sharks, however, have managed to stay squeaky clean for more than 100 million years. And now, thanks to them, infections may go the way of the dinosaur.

Unlike other large marine creatures, sharks don't collect slime, algae, or barnacles on their bodies. That phenomenon intrigued engineer Tony Brennan, who was trying to design a better barnacle-preventative coating for Navy ships when he learned about it in 2003. Investigating the skin further, he discovered that a shark's entire body is covered in miniature, bumpy scales, like a carpet of tiny teeth. Algae and barnacles can't grasp hold, and for that matter, neither can troublesome bacteria such as E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus.

Brennan's research inspired a company called Sharklet, which began exploring how to use the sharkskin concept to make a coating that repels germs. Today, the firm produces a sharkskin-inspired plastic wrap that's currently being tested on hospital surfaces that get touched the most (light switches, monitors, handles). So far, it seems to be successfully fending off germs. The company already has even bigger plans; Sharklet's next project is to create a plastic wrap that covers another common source of infections—the catheter.

2. Holy Bat Cane!

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Our story begins in November of 1950, when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were making one of their appearances on the popular weekly variety show The Colgate Comedy Hour. At the end of one of their comedy sketches on the show, a 16-year-old kid named Sammy Petrillo made an appearance as a baby Jerry Lewis, in a crib. Sammy was paid "around $600" for the gig -easy money- he had no lines. A few weeks later, Sammy made another guest appearance as a Jerry Lewis clone on Eddie Cantor's Colgate Comedy Hour turn (the show featured rotating guest hosts).

Actually, our story began 16 years earlier, when Sammy Petrillo was born in the Bronx, in 1934. Like Jerry Lewis, Sammy was born into a show business family. And also like Jerry, Sammy began performing at a very early age and would sometimes join his father onstage when he was performing in the Catskills.

Already bitten by the show biz bug, as a teenager, Sammy enrolled in the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. The turning point of Sammy Petrillo's life occurred one innocent day- when he was getting a haircut.

Sammy: “One day I went down to the Annex at the High School of Performing Arts. The Annex was a trade school and they had people who were learning how to cut hair. And so I got a freebie haircut and the guy cut my hair and he started to laugh. And I said, 'Whatta ya laughing at?' and he said, 'You look just like that Jerry Lewis!' And I said, 'Get outta here!' And everywhere I walked, people laughed and asked me if I was Jerry Lewis, it was unbelievable. And Jerry Lewis at the time, I guess, had made his second motion picture, My Friend Irma Goes West. I really didn't know that much about him. I kinda caught some glimpses of the movie and I saw he went, 'Ack! Ack! Ack!' And he talked kinda high... And I said, 'Gee, maybe I do resemble that guy and I can do that kind of a laugh, I could do that kind of a voice."

Even though species normally evolve in tiny increments, when one develops something that is different from their ancestors, there has to be a first one to try it. YouTube comedian CalebCity imagined how that very first plant decided it would be carnivorous and then evolve into a Venus Flytrap. He plays the roles of two plants and a bumblebee.  

(YouTube link)

Brace yourselves. This is the one-man short version of Little Shop of Horrors. -via Tastefully Offensive

(YouTube link)

In this week's episode of Scatterbrained from Mental Floss, John Green and the gang tell us about shopping malls: their history, purpose, features, and a lot of little things you never realized before. It's a fact-filled primer on shopping malls! There are also tidbits on the most famous department stores that anchored those malls, plus the small shops that exist nowhere else, and the restaurants that were designed just for malls. Shopping malls will never again be what they were in the 1980s and '90s, but they still exist, and their heyday spawned other forms of community shopping. 

While I was never obliged to drink turpentine as a child, I was haunted with the idea a few times. We had access to doctors. My parents, however, were given a few drops occasionally during their childhoods to ward off intestinal worms and other parasites. See, pines trees developed sap that kills parasites, and turpentine is distilled pine resin. Turpentine is good for thinning paint, repelling water, and as fuel for lamps. That doesn't mean it's safe to ingest, but it has a long history as a medicine.

Viewed in context, it’s easier to understand why doctors once used it as medicine. Pine tar, another related product, is still a useful medicine ingredient for rashes and skin problems, while turpentine oil, which was also considered good for lung health, is still an ingredient in Vick’s Vapor-Rub. (Although it’s listed as an inactive ingredient.) Turpentine is antiseptic, too, and the terrible taste and harsh effects could have been interpreted as signs that it was working. “King of the [medicines] was turpentine, a product of the tidewater pine forests,” Kentucky historian Thomas D. Clark wrote. “Turpentine had three important medical requisites: It smelled loud, tasted bad, and burned like the woods on fire.” It also had the strange side effect of making urine smell like violets.

Read the history of turpentine used as medicine at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Flickr user Wystan)

The Weeki Wachee mermaids were magical creatures to me as a child, even though I was old enough to know they were real women. Women with awesome jobs, in my eyes. Like many little girls, I wanted to grow up to be a mermaid. But not badly enough to move to Florida as an adult. I had no idea they were still putting on shows three times a day in 2018!

(YouTube link)

Tom Scott takes us on a tour of Weeki Wachee Springs State Park in Florida, and gives us a bit of the history of the famous -and now gloriously retro- mermaid show.

Making s'mores out of Peeps is the true fusion of spring and summer confections. You can do that without even going outside with the Peeps S’mores Skillet Dip! A hot cast iron skillet under a broiler replaces a campfire, and a rainbow of Peeps provide the eye candy. That won't last long, as you swish a roasted, melty Peep with the melted chocolate using a graham cracker. Or maybe a fork, if you want a neater s'more. Since Easter is the last of the candy holidays until Halloween, you might want to stock up on Peeps so you can have this again and again. Get the complete recipe, with a video, at Hello Giggles. -via Pee-wee Herman

In late 2016, Sam Garland (Poem_for_your_sprog) wrote a funny poem that spawned an entirely new genre of poetry, now called bredlik. You can see many examples in the subreddit /r/ilikthebred or at Twitter. For World Poetry Day last week, O. Westin had the wild idea of fusing bredlik with the iambic pentameter of a classic sonnet. The result is a poem about poetry.

My naym is pome / and lo my form is fix’d
Tho peepel say / that structure is a jail
I am my best / when formats are not mix’d
Wen poits play / subversions often fail

Notice you can read the left side by itself and get a completely different poem. You can also read the right side alone, but the real effect comes by reciting it as a whole. There are four stanzas with a twist at the end. You can read the poem, and the thinking behind it, at Micro SF/F.  -via Metafilter

PS: In researching this post, I came across a delightful song.

(Image credit: Flickr user Tiocfaidh ár lá 1916)

Robert E. Jackson found and compiled a collection of Easter bunnies from back when you expected them to look weird and creepy -and we liked it! Yeah, back in the day, we didn't have any of these 3D printed bespoke furry costumes. We just had papier-mâché heads from someone's kitchen and recycled pajamas.

Or people just put on bunny ears and did the Bunny Hop. Or we skipped all that nonsense and put our kids on ten-foot rabbits and took their picture. See all 16 images at Flashbak. -via Boing Boing

Before YouTube, before websites, and even before computer graphics made advertising as in-your-face as it is now, movies at your local theater were advertised in newspapers. Newspapers were printed with hand-set type, and graphics required their own custom-made print blocks. KB Typesetting was one of the companies that made new print blocks for movie advertising images, which were send out to newspapers around the country, and then usually thrown away after the run of the movie was over locally. As movies became immortal and advertising became ephemeral, the rare print blocks that survived became highly collectible.

That quaint little world of finite supply and demand was blown to smithereens—as thoroughly as the planet Alderaan—in November 1998, when DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner of Omaha were invited into the back room of a local store called Franx Antiques and Art. That’s where they first encountered a cache of 400-plus cardboard boxes filled with more than 50,000 assorted-sized print blocks, plus another 8,000 or so printing plates, all featuring advertisements for movies produced from 1932 to the early 1980s. It was literally tons of stuff, and it had been sitting in that back room, undisturbed, for roughly two decades, when Franx purchased it for several thousand dollars from its Omaha neighbor KB Typesetting.

Naturally, Ginsberg and Wagner had to have it all. So, they scraped together the money to purchase the collection from Franx and find a place to store it, and proceeded to load all those boxes, albeit a few at a time, into Ginsberg’s car.

“My poor Corsica got beat to death,” Ginsberg tells me when we spoke over the phone recently. But the Corsica was the least of Ginsberg and Wagner’s worries: Like the proverbial dog chasing the milk truck, the bigger question confronting the two friends was what to do with their prize now that they had caught it.

The collection included print blocks for everything from The Mummy through Star Wars. Appraisers were astonished, and their estimates of the collection's value have grown over the years. It's even had a documentary made about it. The story of how the collection of movie history came to be and what will happen to it is told at Collectors Weekly. 

As The Last Jedi rolls out on home video, it's not a moment too soon for an Honest Trailer! Screen Junkies repeats a technique they used for The Force Awakens, in using both the current announcer Jon Bailey and their original Honest Trailer voice, Gannon Nickell. Why? Because any Star Wars movie can only be discussed by arguing whether the old ones or the new ones are better.

(YouTube link)

If you've just ordered The Last Jedi for your first viewing, save this trailer for afterward. Not only does it spoil every plot point, it explores why this movie is the most divisive Star Wars movie since the last one. Or the one before that. I got a real giggle out of the cast names, especially Short Round as BB-8. In case you want to take a deep dive into the making of this Honest Trailer, there's a commentary video to accompany this one.

Garfield, the fat cat of comics and movie fame, always craved lasagna. Andrew Rea shows us why that lasagna was so delicious in the latest episode of Binging With Babish. The good news is that Garfield doesn't have to appear in this cooking video, so he doesn't.

(YouTube link)

All the parts of this lasagna are hand-made before they are assembled. J. Kenji López-Alt's recipe for Ragu Bolognese is at Serious Eats. To see Brad Leone make the ricotta cheese, see his video. The instructions for homemade pasta is in a previous video by Andrew Rea. I can guarantee that after going through all this for a pan of lasagna, the cat is not getting it. -via reddit

In Japanese Folklore, the Ashiarai Yashiki is a giant filthy foot that crashes through the ceiling at night and demands to be washed. If you don't wash it, it will rampage through your house pic.twitter.com/MBwalGWFDZ

— 41 Strange (@41Strange) March 26, 2018

Japanese monster stories are so bizarre that it's hard to know whether they are old or were made up for some modern manga, but Ashiarai Yashiki is apparently a real legend. According to the Villains Wiki,

The Ashiarai Yashiki is an extremely bizarre Japanese spirit that takes the form of a disembodied leg and foot, many times larger than a normal human and often covered in mud or blood - this frightening being was believed to literally smash its way into the homes of terrified humans and demand them to wash it.

The reason behind this attack was unknown and most likely could never really be understood as spirits such as the Ashiarai Yashiki were believed to be governed by laws far beyond human understanding, yet even by Japanese mythology standards the Ashiarai Yashiki stands out as one of the more unique monsters of folklore and despite being little more than a giant foot it was capable of human speech.

The only way I can picture this happening is in a Terry Gilliam animation. You have to wonder if he was familiar with the legend of Ashiarai Yashiki. -via madamjujujive

Ernest Cline's first novel is a science fiction story called Ready Player One. Steven Spielberg made a movie from it, in theaters this weekend. But Cline's earlier fan fiction, in the form of screenplays, introduced him to Hollywood in a spectacular way. He was the original writer behind the 2009 movie Fanboys. It started when he was grieving the loss of his mother to cancer in the late '90s.

That was right when Lucasfilm announced that they were making more Star Wars – that first clip of George working on the script? StarWars.com would release videos that they were entering pre-production. It was like hearing that a new chapter of the Bible had just been discovered. It became my way to distract myself over losing my mom. I was working tech support and doing web design, so I was in front of the internet all day looking at prequel websites. Then one day it occurred to me: What if I was in my mom's position and I knew I was dying and wasn't going to live to see this movie?

As soon as I had the idea, it occurred to me that's the stupidest thought ever to pass through my head.

But it resonated with Star Wars fans, and the script he wrote circulated for years. The eventual producer and director were in college when they fell in love with the story. Over time, more people got involved and George Lucas even signed off on the project. Fans followed the film's progress online. Harvey Weinstein would be the distributor. Only after a successful preview for fans at the first European Star Wars Celebration in 2007 did Weinstein begin to throw his weight around. He wanted the movie changed.  

[Director] Kyle Newman: They owned it. I mean, they paid for it. I respect that's part of the filmmaking culture. I paint, I draw, and I own that stuff. But I made a commitment to the folks at Lucasfilm, to the Star Wars fan community and to my cast and crew about the tone of the film.

Ernie Cline: Weinstein pitched them the idea of taking out the whole plot of the dying friend. They strategically shot scenes that made it so the fanboys were just going on the trip because they wanted to see the movie early. No one's dying. They all are just going because they want to trespass. It robs the movie of its whole call to adventure, and the whole heart of the picture. We actually saw that cut of the movie. They screened that cut with the original cut two nights in a row in Reseda or something, and that was going to be the version that they would have released.

Reshoots and negotiations took another couple of years, and Fanboys was ultimately released in only ten theaters, with almost no promotion. Cline learned his lesson and wrote Ready Player One as a novel instead of a screenplay. Read the story of what happened to Fanboys from the folks who made it at Thrillist. 

(Image credit: Jason Hoffman/Thrillist)

I knew something was off about this scene from the less-than-symmetrical eyes on the left person's face. Then the robotic word selection in the second panel confirmed it. But it can't be a robot, because a robot would never say "returning back." That's redundant. I thought all this before reaching the second row, which took a totally unexpected turn, but it fits the setup perfectly. Those birds didn't have the greatest disguise, but our victim was too busy on his phone to even notice. This comic is from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble, who thinks through all the details.