Grabbing water
  We introduce a novel technique for grabbing water with a flexible solid. This new passive pipetting mechanism was inspired by floating flowers and relies purely on the coupling of the elasticity of thin plates and the hydrodynamic forces at the liquid interface. Developing a theoretical model has enabled us to design petal-shaped objects with maximum grabbing capacity. 
P. M. Reis, J. Hure, S. Jung, J. W. M. Bush, C. Clanet
cond-mat.soft