1 2020-03-10T17:06:16+00:00 method=node/your-favorite-insects-wing-now-in-plastic;methodNumNodes=1; 1 Your Favorite Insect's Wing, Now in Plastic! If you have ever been kept up at night wondering what a cicada wing looks like at 10,000 magnification, now you can rest easy. Or at least a little easier, because this is not an actual cicada wing, but is a polymer replica of a cicada wing. The tightly-packed, uniformly distributed pillars observed make cicada wings incredibly water-resistant and replicas like that pictured here could be applied to coat any material you want to make water-resistant. However, that�s not really why my research group is interested in these wings. Instead, we want to cast these polymer cicada wing structures on electrodes, immerse them in a fluorescent gel, run an electric current across the electrodes, and use a microscope to see how the fluorescent gel interacts with the structures! Although we are still in the early stages of this project, the interactions we observe between the gels and nanostructures, be it the cicada wing structure pictured here or any number of other surface nanostructures, will have implications that help us understand how proteins and DNA move around within cells. 2020-03-10T17:06:16+00:00 Spencer Schmidt