Just goes to show that we can still learn a lot from nature. Scientists in Santa Barbara have been making nanomaterials using a method they cribbed from a marine sponge. The sponge creates intricate lattices of glass as it grows. The versions that are being turned out in the labs are made of many different materials, and the semiconductor types could be a boon to solar cell technologies, where a big surface area in a small space is a definite bonus.