How Cucumber Tendrils Hoist Their Payload Sunward (3 of 11) (IMAGE)

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

How Cucumber Tendrils Hoist Their Payload Sunward (3 of 11)

Caption

This is a darkfield microscope image of an extracted fiber ribbon stained with toluidine blue. The discovery of cucumber tendril overwinding and its mechanical consequences hints at the possibility of designing biomimetic twistless springs with tunable mechanical behavior. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the Aug. 31, 2012, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by S.J. Gerbode at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues was titled, "How the Cucumber Tendril Coils and Overwinds."

Credit

Image courtesy of Joshua Puzey

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