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The paper's lead author, Dr. Samuel Wilson-Whitford, a former postdoctoral research associate in Gilchrist's Laboratory of Particle Mixing and Self-Organization, captured the movement entirely by serendipity in the course of his research into microencapsulation.

As they detailed in a recent article published in the scientific journal Small, researchers at MIT have developed a silk-based substitute for plastics for certain industrial products — specifically, industry systems that currently use plastics for microencapsulation processes.

Microencapsulation is process via which tiny particles or droplets are covered with a substance that turns them into a pill-shaped object, one that protects its core from degradation through things like air or moisture exposure.

While tweaking a manufacturing technique known as microencapsulation in 1966, he invented what we now know as scratch-and-sniff.

Since the 1960s, forms of microencapsulation have been used to preserve attractive colored stripes in toothpaste and to create the mysterious liquid crystal substance inside mood rings.