Food production in green crops is severely limited by low activity and poor specificity of D-ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO) in natural photosynthesis (NPS). This work presents a scientific solution to overcome this problem by immobilizing RuBisCO into a microfluidic reactor, which demonstrates a continuous production of glucose precursor at 13.8 μmol g⁻¹ RuBisCO min⁻¹ from CO₂ and ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate. Experiments show that the RuBisCO immobilization significantly enhances enzyme stabilities (7.2 folds in storage stability, 6.7 folds in thermal stability), and also improves the reusability (90.4% activity retained after 5 cycles of reuse and 78.5% after 10 cycles). This work mimics the NPS pathway with scalable microreactors for continuous synthesis of glucose precursor using very small amount of RuBisCO. Although still far from industrial production, this work demonstrates artificial synthesis of basic food materials by replicating the light-independent reactions of NPS, which may hold the key to food crisis relief and future space colonization.

In recent years, the compound eye imaging system has attracted great attention due to its fascinating optical features such as large field of view (FOV), small volume and high acuity to moving objects. However, it is still a big challenge to fabricate such a whole system due to the mismatch between the spherical compound eye imaging element and the planar imaging sensor. In this work, we demonstrate a kind of hemispherical compound eye camera (SCECam) which analogs the eye of the fruit fly. The SCECam consists of three sub-systems, a hemispherical compound eye, an optical relay system and a commercial CMOS imaging sensor. By introducing an intermediate optical relay system, the curved focal plane after the compound eye can be transformed and projected onto the planar focal plane of the imaging sensor. In this way, the SCECam can realize a large FOV (up to 122.4°) with 4400 ommatidia, which makes it possible to detect and locate fast moving objects at a very fast speed. It is calculated that the recognition speed of the SCECam is two to three orders of magnitude higher than those conventional methods such as the Canny and Log edge-detection methods.

Solar energy is regarded as one of the most plentiful sources of renewable energy. An extraordinary light-harvesting property of a germanium periodic nanopyramid array is reported in this Letter. Both our theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the nanopyramid array can achieve perfect broadband absorption from 500- to 800-nm wavelength. Especially in the visible regime, the experimentally measured absorption can even reach 100%. Further analyses reveal that the intrinsic antireflection effect and slow-light waveguide mode play an important role in the ultra-high absorption, which is helpful for the research and development of photovoltaic devices.

Natural selection has driven arthropods to evolve fantastic natural compound eyes (NCEs) with a unique anatomical structure, providing a promising blueprint for artificial compound eyes (ACEs) to achieve static and dynamic perceptions in complex environments. Specifically, each NCE utilises an array of ommatidia, the imaging units, distributed on a curved surface to enable abundant merits. This has inspired the development of many ACEs using various microlens arrays, but the reported ACEs have limited performances in static imaging and motion detection. Particularly, it is challenging to mimic the apposition modality to effectively transmit light rays collected by many microlenses on a curved surface to a flat imaging sensor chip while preserving their spatial relationships without interference. In this study, we integrate 271 lensed polymer optical fibres into a dome-like structure to faithfully mimic the structure of NCE. Our ACE has several parameters comparable to the NCEs: 271 ommatidia versus 272 for bark beetles, and 180^o field of view (FOV) versus 150–180^o FOV for most arthropods. In addition, our ACE outperforms the typical NCEs by ~100 times in dynamic response: 31.3 kHz versus 205 Hz for Glossina morsitans. Compared with other reported ACEs, our ACE enables real-time, 180^o panoramic direct imaging and depth estimation within its nearly infinite depth of field. Moreover, our ACE can respond to an angular motion up to 5.6×10⁶ deg/s with the ability to identify translation and rotation, making it suitable for applications to capture high-speed objects, such as surveillance, unmanned aerial/ground vehicles, and virtual reality.

This paper reports a biomimetic design of microchannels in the planar reactors with the aim to optimize the photocatalytic efficiency of water purification. Inspired from biology, a bifurcated microchannel has been designed based on the Murray's law to connect to the reaction chamber for photocatalytic reaction. The microchannels are designed to have a constant depth of 50 μm but variable aspect ratios ranging from 0.015 to 0.125. To prove its effectiveness for photocatalytic water purification, the biomimetic planar reactors have been tested and compared with the non-biomimetic ones, showing an improvement of the degradation efficiency by 68%. By employing the finite element method, the flow process of the designed microchannel reactors has been simulated and analyzed. It is found that the biomimetic design owns a larger flow velocity fluctuation than that of the non-biomimetic one, which in turn results in a faster photocatalytic reaction speed. Such a biomimetic design paves the way for the design of more efficient planar reactors and may also find applications in other microfluidic systems that involve the use of microchannels.