The Isothermal Dendritic Growth Experiment advanced our knowledge of materials science.

Dendritic cells, or macrophages, capture the virus and display pieces of it.

It's a dendritic drainage pattern that can be formed only by the flow of liquids.

So to our blueprint, we need to add tuned spines.

Let's slow it down and you can see the spines in action.

The dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia, which are the equivalent of plant roots.

But of course, we can deal with that because we can produce artificial spines.

The books also have high packed LEDs on the spines. So it's all display.

And where they have a problem with this kind of mesh, because they don't have spines.

The crabs are missing spines, so they have a problem in this kind of rough terrain.

Now just because we have a distributed foot and spines doesn't mean you can climb vertical surfaces.

We can make spines that catch on simulated debris and collapse on removal to easily pull them out.

We did that by putting these artificial spines on crabs, as you see here, and then we tested them.

These tuned structures allow the spines, friction pads and ultimately the adhesive hairs to grab onto very challenging, difficult surfaces.

The next step is to make compliant toes, and try to add spines and claws and set it for dry adhesives.

And one of the other things I'd been interested in and obsessed with over the years is spines and skeletons, having collected a couple of hundred.

RF So if you look carefully at this, what you see is that they have spines and until a few weeks ago, no one knew what they did.

One day when I was only seven years old and fishing, I pulled a pinfish, they're called, with sharp dorsal spines, up too hard and fast, and I blinded myself in one eye.

Now if we look at animals, though, to be really maneuverable in all surfaces, the animals use hybrid mechanisms that include claws, and spines, and hairs, and pads, and glue, and capillary adhesion and a whole bunch of other things.