It often pays to borrow a page from nature's playbook. Just look at the UC Berkeley scientists who recently made headlines with their cockroach-inspired robot. "Often nature's most revolting animals ...

Robotics engineers found a way to help robots navigate through very tight spaces by attaching a shell that mimics the shape of one of nature's most resilient but most reviled creatures: the cockroach.

Scarlett Howard currently has funding from the Australian Research Council and the Hermon Slade Foundation. These tasks seem completely irrelevant to these animals in their natural environment, so why ...