Scales That Cut Drag

A shark's skin is not smooth. It is paved with millions of tiny tooth-shaped scales called dermal denticles, each carved with fine ridges that steer water into clean channels instead of messy swirls. Those ridges shave drag, so the shark glides faster on less effort. The same ridged texture leaves bacteria nothing flat to settle on. Sharks were running this design for hundreds of millions of years before any engineer thought to copy it.

Sharklet Surfaces

Engineers copied that riblet logic to make Sharklet: a surface covered in microscopic diamond-like ridges. Bacteria have trouble settling on it because the texture makes attachment physically awkward.

Unlike antibiotic coatings, Sharklet does not kill microbes directly. That means it should create less selection pressure for drug resistance, though no surface can make evolution impossible.