Insect legs

Insects such as water striders are able to walk effortlessly on water because of the fact that their legs are super hydrophobic.

Now, scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and at Japan's Riken Institute are one step closer to discovering what makes the structure of these legs so unique.

In nature, organisms such as caterpillars, water striders and the lotus achieve super hydrophobia through a two-level structure - a hydrophobic waxy surface made super hydrophobic by the addition of microscopic hair-like structures: these structures may be covered by even smaller hairs, greatly increasing the surface area of the organism and making it impossible for water droplets to stick.

Using a superfast supercomputer at Riken (the fastest in the world when the research started in 2005), a Japanese team led by Xiao Cheng Zeng, Ameritas university professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, designed a computer simulation to perform tens of thousands of experiments that studied how surfaces behaved under many different conditions.