Scientists have long been fascinated by the "self-cleaning" lotus leaf and the "fog-collecting" Stenocara beetle. In these cases, nature has engineered materials with heterogeneous texture or chemistry to control the tendency of fluids to wet the surface. There has been great interest in developing artificial mimics with similar properties for applications such as antifouling paints and self-cleaning automobile windshields (7). An alternative strategy for surface-mediated fluid control is to tune a surface's wettability by applying pulses of electrical energy. This phenomenon, known as electrowetting (2, 3), has the advantage of being dynamic, a property which has made it useful for applications in areas as diverse as optics and laboratory miniaturization.
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