Ants, okra, cow mucus... these and more have inspired scientific solutions

Okra may not only fill our daily veggie quota, but also help stop bleeding in the form of a biodegradable plaster if Canadian researchers succeed in human trials. — Filepic

Even as animals and plants face widespread extinction from human-driven causes like climate change, the natural world continues to inspire scientific discovery in unexpected ways.

“Nature has spent hundreds of millions of years optimising elegant solutions to extremely complicated problems,” says University of California, Irvine, biomedical engineer Alon Gorodetsky in the United States.