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I. Gebeshuber:
"Biomimetics and Nanotechnology";
UKM Press, Bangi, 2011, ISBN: 978-967-412-004-7; 60 pages.

One of the fascinating aspects of nanotechnology is that on the nanometre scale all the natural sciences meet and intertwine. Physics meets life sciences as well as engineering, chemistry, materials science and computational approaches, which altogether communicate and are closely linked. This inherent interdisciplinarity of nanotechnology offers enormous potential for fruitful crossfertilisation in specialist areas. Biomimetics is a prominent research area at the meeting place of life sciences with engineering and physics. Biomimetics deals with knowledge transfer from living nature to technology: underlying principles are identified and subsequently transferred to and applied in science, engineering and medicine. Nature excels at combining materials, structures and processes. Biomimetic nanotechnology is a continuously growing field that deals with knowledge transfer from biology to nanotechnology. Investigations of organisms on the nanoscale have wide ranging implications for the understanding of processes in healthy and health impaired living beings and ecosystems and yield novel approaches in engineering and medicine. Biomimetic nanotechnology is a field that has the potential to drive major technical advances and that might substantially support successful mastering of major global challenges. The scope of this lecture is to highlight research work performed by the author at the Institute of Microengineering and Nanoelectronics at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in the years 2009 and 2010. Bioinspired MEMS, a new concept for niche tourism in Malaysia (concerning innovation in nanomaterials engineering) and a novel concept for
dynamic ways of scientific publishing and accessing human knowledge inspired by transdisciplinary approaches are treated in detail. The key objectives of these activities are to strengthen Malaysia as a research location and to determine new ways of doing and presenting science that are accessible for all.