Nature is a rich source of inspiration for how to attach two things together. From dragonfly heads, to ivy on walls, to cockleburs on fur, nature has been doing it for millennia, and can teach us some new tricks.
Inspiration for innovative and more environmentally sustainable designs are all around us. Humpback whales have inspired quieter, more efficient industrial fans, wind turbine blades that work in lower wind speeds, and a way of catching fish without undesirable by-catch. Biomimicry works best when we approach nature with a sense of wonder and start asking questions.
Leif Ristroph and Stephen Childress from New York University have just released work with a new robotic ornithopter with a biomechanical design based not on traditional insects or birds, but rather on the aquatic jellyfish.
Businesses interested in meeting environmental sustainability goals can learn a lot from ecosystems. Functioning ecosystems are closed-loop systems, where one organism’s waste is another organism’s food or building material. An example of such industrial ecology is the ZERI beer brewing system that replaces the “make, take, and waste” linear resource stream with a circular system in which waste is treated as a resource rather than as garbage. This is biomimicry at the system scale.
How Does Nature Make It? is a collaboration between MAKE and the Biomimicry 3.8 Institute, a non-profit dedicated to equipping innovators with the tools to solve sustainability challenges using nature’s designs and core principles. The most popular of those tools is AskNature, the world’s most comprehensive catalog of nature’s solutions to human design challenges. By understanding how these adaptations work, makers can mimic ideas that have thrived in balance with Earth’s complex systems. This series explores these adaptations.
Are we entering an age where those technologies, formerly found only in the imaginations of science fiction authors, now become possible for anyone to attempt? What can we do? How far should we go? These are questions we’re only beginning to explore.
World Maker Faire in New York will be offering a robust assortment of DIY Bio presentations an exhibits, with everything from circuits created from slime-molds to hacking a brain’s EEG signals.
Dash Robotics launches a fundraising campaign at Dragon Innovation for their bio-inspired origami folded robot.
