This slime materials mover is just absurdly cool to watch in action. At first it seems like there's not much purpose to it, but you can totally imagine it might come in handy in a laboratory setting, working with a variety of different materials. It could also be handy in art, really. Picking up media and moving them to a precise spot has a lot of potential.
I had a conversation with someone about it where we also recalled a nanotechnology exhibit at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham. The exhibit showed surface materials composed of nanoscale tech that was meant to imitate the way water rolls off cabbage leaves without the regular surface tension water displays when rolling on other things. I guess this is a similar phenomenon to what happens when water rolls off a duck's feathers. Biomimicry at its finest.
It's interesting to think of how difficult we find it to imitate what occurs automatically in nature (though I suppose nature has billions of evolution-years on us).
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