The term “nature-inspired” is associated with a sequence of efforts to understand, synthesize and imitate any natural object or phenomenon either in a tangible or intangible form, which allows us to obtain improved insights into nature. Such inspirations can come through materials, processes, or designs that we see around us. Materials, as opposed to processes and designs found in nature, are tangible and can readily be used without engineering efforts. One such example is that of an aquaporin that is used to filter water. The scope of this work in nature-inspired materials is to define, clarify, and consolidate our current understanding by reviewing examples from the laboratory to industrial scale to highlight emerging opportunities. A careful analysis of “nature-inspired materials” shows that they possess specific functionality that relies on our ability to harness particular electrical, mechanical, biological, chemical, sustainable, or combined gains.

The world is witnessing tumultuous times as major economic powers including the US, UK, Russia, India, and most of Europe continue to be in a state of lockdown. The worst-hit sectors due to this lockdown are sales, production (manufacturing), transport (aerospace and automotive) and tourism. Lockdowns became necessary as a preventive measure to avoid the spread of the contagious and infectious “Coronavirus Disease 2019” (COVID-19). This newly identified disease is caused by a new strain of the virus being referred to as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS CoV-2; formerly called 2019-nCoV). We review the current medical and manufacturing response to COVID-19, including advances in instrumentation, sensing, use of lasers, fumigation chambers and development of novel tools such as lab-on-the-chip using combinatorial additive and subtractive manufacturing techniques and use of molecular modelling and molecular docking in drug and vaccine discovery. We also offer perspectives on future considerations on climate change, outsourced versus indigenous manufacturing, automation, and antimicrobial resistance. Overall, this paper attempts to identify key areas where manufacturing can be employed to address societal challenges such as COVID-19.

The high entropy alloys have become the most intensely researched materials in recent times. They offer the flexibility to choose a large array of metallic elements in the periodic table, a combination of which produces distinctive desirable properties that are not possible to be obtained by the pristine metals. Over the past decade, a myriad of publications has inundated the aspects of materials synthesis concerning HEA. Hitherto, the practice of HEA development has largely relied on a trial-and-error basis, and the hassles associate with this effort can be reduced by adopting a machine learning approach. This way, the “right first time” approach can be adopted to deterministically predict the right combination and composition of metallic elements to obtain the desired functional properties. This article reviews the latest advances in adopting machine learning approaches to predict and develop newer compositions of high entropy alloys. The review concludes by highlighting the newer applications areas that this accelerated development has enabled such that the HEA coatings can now potentially be used in several areas ranging from catalytic materials, electromagnetic shield protection and many other structural applications.