Slippery liquid surfaces confuse mussels

It all began with a bet at a conference in Italy in 2013. Nicolas Vogel, Ph.D., then a postdoctoral fellow in Joanna Aizenberg's lab at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), gave a talk about the group's Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces (SLIPS) coatings, which promised to prevent nearly anything from adhering to structures to which they were applied. In the audience wa