New barnacle-inspired paste could stop heavy bleeding in seconds

When someone’s losing a lot of blood, doctors turn to coagulants. But these products can take minutes to work—minutes a patient may not have. Enter barnacles. The marine crustaceans can glom onto nearly anything—from ships to whales—thanks to an oil they secrete that primes surfaces by sweeping away contaminants, Wired reports. In a new study, scientists made their own synthetic version of barnacles’ glue by grinding up adhesive sheets and mixing them with silicone oil that repels blood. The substance was able to stop bleeding in rat and pig models in as few as 15 seconds, they report this month in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The next step is to figure out how long the paste will last before dissolving, and whether it could damage tissue over time.