Oxygen is an essential source for humans or autonomous underwater vehicles. However, the underwater activity is limited in present, because of the limited capacity of diving cylinders. In nature, there are some insects, which utilize superhydrophobic hair structures as physical gills, semipermanently living in water. We focused on this physical gill, which was called plastron and was trapped air bubble at the surface, and attempted to prepare artificial plastrons by using self-organized honeycomb-patterned films. In this paper, we show the preparation of artificial plastrons and the measurement of their oxygen permeability. We found that durable honeycomb-patterned films resisted the water pressure can be prepared by using polybutadiene and poly (bisphenol A carbonate), and dissolved oxygen inwater was transferred to oxygen consumption bottle inside though the porous films. These data suggest that the honeycomb-patterned films may be used as artificial plastrons.

Recent advances in non-contact atomic force microscopy (NC-AFM) allow us to visualize structural frameworks of small organic molecules. So far, metallic probes mounted on a stiff piezoelectric sensor in a qPlus configuration and functionalized with a CO molecule have been mostly used to observe relatively flat molecules that are adsorbed parallel to the surface. We have developed a new method that is capable of imaging 3D molecules and surface systems using a so-called multi-pass routine. This imaging method can be used with commercial Si cantilevers to obtain submolecular resolution under less demanding conditions compared to the CO-functionalized probe. In this report, we describe technical points, theoretical interpretation of image contrast, and examples of multi-pass images. A comparison with the previous method is also given to better understand our newly developed technique.