Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshadrati. This week, shark skins, plain wings and novel things.

One of the best things I get to do in my job is to visit early stage startups, full of passionate

people coming up with the solutions to the climate problem. Some of them work with the kind of

headline-grabbing tech you hear about all the time, batteries, carbon capture, and even nuclear fusion.

But there's all sorts of weird and wonderful inventions out there

which hope to fill in the blank spaces in the net zero puzzle.

What we've made here is inspired by shark skin.

It is much more simplified than actual shark skin.

So they're running in this direction.

Yeah.

And if you run your finger across, you can hear that buzzing.

That's the voice of Henry Belinski, the founder of MicroTau.

And the high-pitched noise you can hear is his finger running back and forth across a thin

plastic film.

This is the startup's innovation, a textured film that imitates shark skin to reduce drag on airplanes.

To the naked eye, it's basically transparent, but when you look at it under a microscope, you can see these tiny ridges, known as riblets, that mimic the pattern seen on shark skin.

Think about it like a high-tech wrapping paper, but for planes, all in the service of using

less fuel to fly and thus produce fewer emissions.

Aviation contributes about 2% of global emissions, and its share is expected to rise in

coming decades, so solutions are badly needed.

Henry is showing me around a dimly lit room bathed in orange light.

This is the lab MicroTau uses to 3D print this film.

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