My Octopus Teacher — a documentary about the smarts of cephalopods — inspired a team of engineers to create materials that can grab and release objects with rough and irregular surfaces. Those novel materials, which have many potential uses — from helping people with disabilities to better grab objects to creating robots to assist in underwater cleanup — are presented in an Advanced Science report.
Michael Bartlett, the lead investigator in the study and engineering professor at Virginia Tech, remembers one key scene from the film: an octopus sits at the bottom of the ocean but remains hidden under a pile of rocks and shells stuck to its suckers. When a diver approaches, the animal instantly releases those items and flees.
“That kind of capability where you could hold on to something strongly, but then release it almost instantly is really what got our attention about what the octopus can do,” says Bartlett.
