Australian brush-turkey eggs inspire ideas for germ-resistant coatings
Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 15:20
in Biology & Nature
(Phys.org) —Rather than sit on its eggs to incubate them, the Australian brush-turkey buries them in rotting vegetation. While bacterial decomposition heats the eggs, it doesn't infect them. University of Akron scientists probed the phenomenon and discovered that the brush-turkey's eggshell surface—dotted with nanospheres—blocks bacteria. The finding, featured as the cover article in the April 2014 Journal of Experimental Biology, inspires possibilities for synthetic coatings that mimic the eggshell's germ-resistant properties.