Why ketchup will never be the same again

"Let nature be your teacher," wrote William Wordsworth. "She has a world of ready wealth." Joanna Aizenberg, a Harvard professor who specialises in "biomimetics", has taken this to heart and the results are exciting. Well, certainly if getting tomato ketchup out of the bottle is a bugbear of yours. After studying how the lining of the carnivorous pitcher plant snares insects by becoming super-slippery when wet – it "locks in" a thin water layer with its sponge-like surface and causes a hydroplaning effect – Aizenberg and her fellow researchers have created a material called "Slips" (slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces). It repels almost any type of liquid, including blood and oil, and "self-heals" if scratched. Potential applications are many, including self-cleaning windows and fuel transportation, but the research team decided to first test how it repelled sauces and jam. Now Aizenberg says she can envisage fresh complications: "The problem with using it to coat sauce bottles may be that the sauce comes out a little too easily on to people's food."