Make Like a Dog, Owl, or Beetle: How Biomimetics Will Improve Our Lives
November 30, 2012
The greatest breakthroughs in health and engineering may be as near as the back yard: 13 more stimulating stories from biomimetics.
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
July 17, 2012
Your body contains a lot of things engineers would like to copy, and not just at the scale of C3P0-like humanoid robots.
From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology
April 22, 2012
Living things have solved physics problems like design engineers. Inventors are just now catching on to their tricks in ways that could improve our technology, weaning us off our crude, polluting past and ushering in advanced technology that is not only greener but more effective. The latest stars are two insects and a bacterium.
Small Animals Astound, Inspire
May 17, 2011
Elephants and great whales impress us with their bulk, but there are smaller critters that are no less impressive. Here are a few fantastic animals that come in very small packages. Bears in space: Here’s an animal so bizarre, so well-armed, so scary looking, if you knew they were in your back yard you would […]
Hummingbird Tongue More Clever Than Thought
May 8, 2011
Humans sip their nectar by tipping a glass and slurping, but how can a hummingbird pull liquid out of flowers with a tongue alone? Up until now, scientists thought that hummingbird tongues acted like capillary tubes. New research with high-speed cameras show that the action is much more clever – so clever it might lead […]
Venom for Health
May 7, 2011
Remember when botulinum toxin, one of the most potent poisons known to man, entered medical science for good? Now fashion models brag about how “botox” improved their good looks, and sufferers of excess sweating or migraines find relief with the neurotoxin. The search for good in bad substances has not stopped; other venomous organisms, once […]
Animal Tricks Inspire
April 26, 2011
Here we are in the millennium of science, and we are still trying to figure out how animals do such nifty things. Some of their nifty tricks we didn’t even know about till researchers took a look. With high-tech monitoring tools, we might even learn the tricks for our own good. Owl fowl: The flapping […]
Plagiarizing Nature
March 28, 2011
Copying someone else’s invention is a crime, but researchers in biomimetics are doing it with impunity and getting away with it. Leaf power: “Why come up with new ways to generate clean energy, when we can copy what plants have been doing for millennia?” That’s what led Daniel Nocera and colleagues at MIT to develop […]
Neurons Know What to Do
March 27, 2011
Neurons are among the most vital cells in the body: after all, your brain is largely composed of neurons. Neurons are transmission lines of information that keep a body in touch with itself and the world. None of the other body organs would work without neurons. The increasingly powerful tools of microscopy are allowing neuroscientists […]
Plants Spring into Action
March 26, 2011
We shouldn’t take plants for granted. They seem so slow and stationary, but actually they move and breath and carry on their lives in truly amazing ways. Plants really show off their glory in the spring. But how do they know, without eyes, what time it is? In “The science of spring,” PhysOrg […]
Follow the Insects
March 15, 2011
Science has good reason to study insects – not just because they are the most numerous and diverse animals on the planet. They know some tricks we would do well to emulate. Robot designers are taking the lead on following insects. Print a fly: New printers are allowing inventors to print the paper-thin wings they […]
Feather Color Is a Costly Complex System Design
March 13, 2011
The brilliant, shimmering colors in the breast feathers of the Bird of Paradise have long fascinated ornithologists. Alfred Russell Wallace was perhaps the first Englishman to see the magnificent birds in their native Malaysian habitats and wrote, “the richness of their glossy orange colouring, and the exquisite delicacy of the loosely waving feathers, were unsurpassable.”1 […]
Bone Structure Matches Animal Size
March 10, 2011
The bigger the animal, the more weight it has to carry. How can large animals maintain strong bones without making them heavier? It turns out all animals have struts in their bones called trabeculae, but the larger the animal, the fewer, stronger, and farther apart are the struts. This new finding is leading to ideas […]
Plant Accelerates 600 G’s
February 17, 2011
Among the fastest organisms in the world is – a plant. The bladderwort Utricularia, a carnivorous plant that lives in the water, sucks in its prey in a thousandth of a second with an acceleration 600 times the force of gravity. New Scientist and Science Daily reported on work by the University of […]
How Bacteria Use Their Flagella
February 9, 2011
Do an imaginary mind-meld with a bacterium for a moment. Visualize yourself encased in a membrane, surrounded by fluid. You have no eyes, ears, or hands. You need to find where food is, and avoid danger, so you have organelles that can take in molecules that provide information about what is going on outside, where […]