Steve Perlman rappels down a cliff in the Wailau Valley on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. He is a botanist who has spent the last 45 years searching for, and protecting, rare plants

The leaves of the Venus flytrap are snapping shut, jailing its prey through a process called snap-buckling. The outer leaf surface expands until it’s too much for the inner surface of the leaf to bear.

This is not a garden but a collection of lab tools called pipettes. They’re used to move small amounts of fluid from one place to another. And these experimental designs are based on part of a liverwort, a type of plant. (10 millimeters equals 0.4 inch.)