Learning from the natural world
Ullas Ponnadi
Let us start this article with an interesting question. Have we, humans, really invented anything?
We have a wide range of fascinating inventions that have made our life simpler, helped us cure and correct disorders and diseases, reduced travel and communication distances, and helped delegate work to machines.
Were these really inventions? Or were they merely a rediscovery of what nature has been working on, fine-tuning, evolving, making them perfect, making them the most energy efficient, all the while ensuring that they are the most sustainable form of development, over the past millions of years?
Let us park this question for a while, and understand what biomimicry is all about.
Biomimetics or biomimicry is a branch of science that combines biology and technology, and all of our current knowledge of science to understand what nature has perfected over millions of years, and then adapt that via models and systems to help solve complex problems faced by humans.
The beauty of this branch of science is that all of the existing specialisations related to higher education – whether it is the pure sciences, fields of engineering as in mechanical, civil, electrical, electronics, etc., or the field of medicine – can learn from nature and adapt, create, and then find solutions to a variety of difficult problems.
Why biomimicry now?
In about 2.5 million years, which is a tiny timeline in the earth’s existence, we humans have become the single largest species on this planet with the current population standing at seven billion and counting.
We are now bursting at the seams. There are too many of us, and our habits are unsustainable. We must find an answer to the question: “How can we live on this planet without destroying it?”
Our existence and methods to support our survival and growth is also wiping out everything, starting from small organisms to entire ecosystems. A survey by the National Biological Service found that one-half of all native ecosystems in the United States are degraded to the point of endangerment.
That makes biomimicry more than just a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It’s also a race to the rescue.
What are some of the complex challenges already solved via biomimicry?
Let us look at a few interesting examples over the past few decades, where scientists have turned to Nature to observe, understand, learn and then adapt and invent. We will cover a few broad sectors as we do so.
Energy
Learning from humpback whales how to create efficient wind power
Humpback whales have irregular looking bumps called tubercles on their flippers. These allow for eight per cent improvement in lift, 32 per cent improvement in drag, and 40 per cent increase in angle of attack. A company called WhalePower is applying the lessons learned from the humpback whales to the design of wind turbines to increase their efficiency. This natural technology also has enormous potential to improve the safety and performance of airplanes, fans, and more.
Architecture
Learning from termites how to create sustainable buildings
Those wonderful termite structures that one sees, represents a very efficient natural construction that allows the temperature inside to be within one degree, day and night, even with massive changes in outside temperatures! The Eastgate Building, an office complex in Harare, Zimbabwe, has an air conditioning system modelled on the self-cooling mounds of termite structures.
Transportation
Learning from kingfishers how to break through boundaries
The engineer who designed the bullet train, an avid bird watcher, had a problem to solve. At 200 miles per hour, the bullet train was very noisy. Air pressure produced large thunder claps as the train emerged from a tunnel, and residents far off started to complain.
He then found a solution in the beak of kingfishers. Designing the train’s front end with that shape created a quieter train, and also one that could travel ten per cent faster while consuming 15 per cent less electricity.
Agriculture
Learning from prairies how to grow food in resilient ways
Modern agricultural practices, in order to rapidly grow the product to sustain our ever growing population, use a lot of fertilizers and pesticides, all of which are extremely harmful and destroy the soil and the local ecosystem.
The Land Institute is making efforts to revolutionise modern agriculture by deriving lessons from the prairies. Using deep rooted plants that can survive year-to-year, they have discovered that yields can be kept the same using much less water and soil resources. Current weedy crops can hence be substituted with these new ones.
Medicine
Learning from mosquitos to create “a nicer needle”
The mosquito bite, while very irritating and annoying, is one of the most efficient designs that nature has created to penetrate the skin with minimum amount of pain.
Material researchers and engineers working at Kansai University, Japan, have studied the mouth of the mosquito and are using complex engineering techniques to design needles that are on the nanometre scale. The result of this blend of materials science and biology is a needle that penetrates like a mosquito, using pressure to stabilise and painlessly glide into the skin. Tests have proved it worked flawlessly.
Communication
Learning from dolphins how to send signals underwater
When sound travels long distance in water it gets scattered and that makes it difficult to read the message delivered via such sound waves.
Dolphins are able to recognize the calls of specific individuals (“signature whistles”) up to 25 kilometres away, demonstrating their ability to communicate and process sound information accurately. By employing several frequencies in each transmission, dolphins have found a way to cope with the sound scattering behaviour of their high frequency, rapid transmissions, and still get their messages reliably heard.
Emulating dolphins’ unique frequency-modulating acoustics, a company called EvoLogics has developed a high-performance underwater modem for data transmission, which is currently employed in the tsunami early warning system throughout the Indian Ocean.
Classroom activity
So now as an exercise, let us look at a few problems that the students can research and then find out from public sites and open education resources, how they have been solved.
Here are the exercises:
- How can we create a replacement for cement, which will help reduce carbon emissions?
- Can we increase the efficiency of pulsed jet propulsion?
Hint: jellyfish - We all know energy consumption for lighting needs to be made more efficient. How do we create the next generation of LEDs?
Hint: nanostructured lens of a firefly - Industrial automation needs very flexible joints. Can we make them better?
Hint: Joints modelled after the necks of ants that enable devices to withstand extreme stresses - Power from batteries are needed everywhere. How can we make better batteries with greater capacity?
Hint: packing design of pomegranate seeds
How can I learn more about it?
For a child pursuing science, this is an exciting area to pursue in higher education. This also requires that a child should no longer segment and learn. In other words, for someone fascinated with maths and physics but not biology (remember those frog dissections!), the answer to solve a complex physics problem, as we saw in the bullet train example or communication of sound waves accurately to a far distance in water, could lie in the biological evolution process of an insect or a bird or a Dolphin!
Here is an excellent place from which schools and students can draw lesson plans: http://ben.biomimicry.net/.
The resource for K-12 Educators provides access more than 80 biomimicry lesson plans, activities, videos, and tools geared to students of varied grade levels. The free toolkit features a special orientation for teachers new to biomimicry.
How about research?
Several universities are now offering formal scholarships. Patents and articles and research grants are all going up. By 2030, the field could account for $425 billion of U.S. GDP and $1.6 trillion of total global output, according to estimates.
* The University of Akron has committed a total $4.25 million to biomimicry R&D. Other colleges in the region, including the Cleveland Institute of Art, Baldwin Wallace University and Lorain County Community College, have also added biomimicry programs with the help of Great Lakes Biomimicry. Efforts are also underway to introduce biomimicry education in K-12 programs across the region.
“Biomimicry brings us novel solutions that have evolved over 3.8 billion years,” says Janine Benyus, the world’s leading biomimicry expert. “They are just novel to us because we never looked at them as models before.”
Benyus believes biomimicry will become part of the R&D processes at every major company.
“There will be biologists at every design table,” she says. “Before companies make any design decisions they’ll ask: How would nature solve this problem?”
“The availability of biological intelligence will have a tremendous impact,” Benyus says. “One day you will be able to type in a problem statement and with the push of a button download a biological blueprint, a 3-D model you can embed in your design.”
So did we humans, really invent anything at all?
Well, we may have. But the more we read about what Nature has created over billions of years of evolution, and given that we have been here only a few million years, we may end up discovering that these inventions of ours were merely discoveries that Nature has already created and refined and perfected.
This is certainly an interesting topic for classroom debate, and also one that will be a fascinating area to follow for years to come.
Reference sites
http://biomimicry.org/what-is-biomimicry/#.VrPrsLJ97eQ
http://biomimicry.net/about/biomimicry/
http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2013-08-18/14-smart-inventions-inspired-by-nature-biomimicry.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccabagley/2014/04/15/biomimicry-how-nature-can-streamline-your-business-for-innovation
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccabagley/2014/04/15/biomimicry-how-nature-can-streamline-your-business-forinnovation/2/#5c081b7f2d1f
* http://uabiomimicry.org/
Biomimicry and artificial photosynthesis
For animal life forms to exist on this planet, they need oxygen to breathe, and food from primary sources likes plants and trees. The core of this lies in the process of Photosynthesis, where the leaf converts sunlight and air to form food for the tree, and releases oxygen for animals to breathe.
The numbers are mind boggling! Plants convert 1000 billion metric tons of CO2 into energy for animals as food, by using only three per cent of sunlight.
Scientists are working on understanding this process to replicate the same. Artificial photosynthesis can create more than one type of fuel. By making minor changes in this process, liquid hydrogen can be produced, that can power hydrogen powered engines. The other option is to generate electricity via the hydrogen generated, using fuel cells.
We can then create limitless sources of energy, potentially less expensive than other energy forms in the long run. In fact, this type of photo-electrochemical reaction could even remove large amounts of harmful CO2 from the air in the process of producing fuel. It’s a win-win situation.
The author is the Director and CTO of CREATNLRN, a venture focussing on creating an adaptive and interactive learning platform for high school students. He can be reached at uponnadi@gmail.com.