The Shinkansen Bullet
Train of the West Japan Railway Company is the fastest train in the
world, traveling 200 miles per hour. The problem? Noise. Air pressure
changes produced large thunder claps every time the train emerged from
a tunnel, causing residents one-quarter a mile away to complain. Eiji
Nakatsu, the train's chief engineer and an avid bird-watcher, asked
himself, "Is there something in Nature that travels quickly and
smoothly between two very different mediums?" Modeling the front-end of
the train after the beak of kingfishers, which dive from the air into
bodies of water with very little splash to catch fish, resulted not
only in a quieter train, but 15% less electricity use even while the
train travels 10% faster.
TOXICS
Learning from Lotus Plants How to Clean without Cleaners
Ask
any school child or adult how leaves keep water from sticking to them,
and they'll almost certainly say, "Because they are so smooth." Yet one
of the most water repellent leaves in the world, that of the Lotus
(Nelumbo nucifera), isn't smooth at all. The myriad crevices of its
microscopically rough leaf surface trap a maze of air upon which water
droplets float, so that the slightest breeze or tilt in the leaf causes
balls of water to roll cleanly off, taking attached dirt particles with
them. Now, microscopically rough surface additives have been introduced
into a new generation of paint, glass, and fabric finishes, greatly
reducing the need for chemical or laborious cleaning. For example,
GreenShield, a fabric finish made by G3i based on the "lotus effect",
achieves the same water and stain repellency as conventional fabric
finishes while using 8 times less harmful fluorinated chemicals
ARCHITECTURE
Learning from Termites How to Create Sustainable Buildings
We
generally think of termites as destroying buildings, not helping design
them. But the Eastgate Building, an office complex in Harare, Zimbabwe,
has an air conditioning system modeled on the self-cooling mounds of
Macrotermes michaelseni, termites that maintain the temperature inside
their nest to within one degree, day and night (while the temperatures
outside swing from 42 °C to 3 °C). The operation of buildings
represents 40% of all the energy used by humanity, so learning how to
design them to be more sustainable is vitally important. Architect Mick
Pearce collaborated with engineers at Arup Associates to design
Eastgate, which uses 90% percent less energy for ventilation than
conventional buildings its size, and has already saved the building
owners over $3.5 million dollars in air conditioning costs.
MEDICINE
Learning From Chimpanzees How to Heal Ourselves
One-quarter
of all modern medicines are derived directly from plants, and there are
hundreds of thousands of other plant species yet to examine, each with
dozens of unique chemical compounds that could prove of medicinal
value. If one wanted to discover more valuable medicines, where would
one start looking? It could take millions of years, literally, to sort
through this enormous variety of plants and plant compounds to find
ones with medicinal value. Fortunately, this is exactly what
researchers have discovered that chimpanzees (Pan spp.) have already
done, over millions of years of evolutionary time. By observing how
chimps and other species cope with illness, researchers have acquired
leads on plants with promising medical applications to human health.
Trees from the Vernonia genus, for example, which chimpanzees regularly
seek out when ill, have been found to contain chemical compounds that
show promise in treating parasites such as pinworm, hookworm, and
giardia in humans.
HUMAN SAFETY
Learning from Dolphins How to Warn People about Tsunamis
Tsunami
waves dozens of feet high when they reach shore may only be tens of
centimeters high as they travel through the deep ocean. In order to
reliably detect them and warn people before they reach land, sensitive
pressure sensors must be located underneath passing waves in waters as
deep as 6000 meters. The data must then be transmitted up to a buoy at
the ocean's surface, where it is relayed to a satellite for
distribution to an early warning center. Transmitting data through
miles of water has proven difficult, however: sound waves, while unique
in being able to travel long distances through water, reverberate and
destructively interfere with one another as they travel, compromising
the accuracy of information. Unless, that is, you are a dolphin.
Dolphins are able to recognize the calls of specific individuals
("signature whistles") up to 25 kilometers away, demonstrating their
ability to communicate and process sound information accurately despite
the challenging medium of water. By employing several frequencies in
each transmission, dolphins have found a way to cope with the sound
scattering behavior of their high frequency, rapid transmissions, and
still get their message 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.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Learning from Human Lungs How to Sequester Carbon
Studying
the way human lungs work is inspiring new technologies that remove
carbon dioxide from sources like flue stacks, preventing this
greenhouse gas from reaching our atmosphere and warming the planet. Our
lungs have 3 major adaptations which give them their carbon dioxide (CO2) removal effectiveness: a super thin membrane, allowing CO2
to travel across and out quickly (how thin? About one thousandth of the
period at the end of this sentence), an enormous surface area (if you
laid flat your lungs' gas exchange surface, it would be 70 times your
body surface area – about the size of a volley ball court), and
specialized chemical translators, namely carbonic anhydrase, which
allows CO2 to be removed from our bloodstream thousands of times faster
than possible without it. In tests by a company called Carbozyme Inc.,
human-made filters inspired by the way our lungs work removed over 90%
of the CO2 travelling through flue stacks. Meanwhile, other
technologies based on the carbonic anhydrase enzyme found in animals
such as mollusks have successfully transformed CO2 into limestone,
which can be stored or used as a building supply.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Learning from Nature How to Create Flow Without Friction
Stand
quietly just about anywhere and you are likely to hear a fan running –
in the computer you are using, in the air conditioning unit of the
building you are in, and throughout the water, air, and electrical
systems upon which the city around you depends. Fans and other
rotational devices are a major part of the human built environment, and
a major component of our total energy usage. Although we've been
building such devices in one form or another since at least 100 B.C.,
we've never built them like Nature does until now. Naturally flowing
fluids, gases, and heat follow a common geometric pattern that differs
in shape from conventional human-made rotors. Nature moves water and
air using a logarithmic or exponentially growing spiral, as commonly
seen in seashells. This pattern shows up everywhere in Nature: in the
curled up trunks of elephants and tails of chameleons, in the pattern
of swirling galaxies in outer space and kelp in ocean surf, and in the
shape of the cochlea of our inner ears and our own skin pores. Inspired
by the way Nature moves water and air, PAX Scientific Inc. applied this
fundamental geometry to the shape of human-made rotary devices for the
first time, in fans, mixers, propellers, turbines and pumps. Depending
on application, the resulting designs reduce energy usage by a
staggering 10-85% over conventional rotors, and noise by up to 75%.
ENERGY
Learning from Humpback Whales How to Create Efficient Wind Power
Like a school bus pirouetting under water, a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae)
– 40-50 feet long and weighing nearly 80,000 pounds – swims in circles
tight enough to produce nets of bubbles only 5 feet across while
corralling and catching krill, its shrimp-like prey. It turns out that
the whale's surprising dexterity is due mainly to its flippers, which
have large, irregular looking bumps called tubercules across their
leading edges. Whereas sheets of water flowing over smooth flippers
break up into myriad turbulent vortices as they cross the flipper,
sheets of water passing through a humpback's tubercules maintain even
channels of fast-moving water, allowing humpbacks to keep their "grip"
on the water at sharper angles and turn tighter corners, even at low
speeds. Wind tunnel tests of model humpback fins with and without
tubercules have demonstrated the aerodynamic improvements tubercules
make, such as an 8% improvement in lift and 32% reduction in drag, as
well as allowing for a 40% increase in angle of attack over smooth
flippers before stalling. A company called WhalePower is applying the
lessons learned from humpback whales to the design of wind turbines to
increase their efficiency, while this natural technology also has
enormous potential to improve the safety and performance of airplanes,
fans, and more.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Learning from Trees and Bones How to Optimize Strength and Materials
The
next time you drive through a forest, go ahead and thank the trees out
your window for helping on your car's crash safety and gas mileage.
Trees engineer themselves in a number of ways to maximize their
strength, such as arranging their fibers to minimize stress and adding
material where strength is needed (take a look at the extra material
beneath a heavy branch, for instance). Bones – unlike trees in that
they must carry moving loads – go a step further by removing material
where it's not needed, optimizing their structure for their dynamic
workloads. Engineers have incorporated these and other lessons learned
from how trees and bones optimize their strength and minimize their use
of materials into software design programs, such as Claus Matteck's
“Soft Kill Option” software, which are revolutionizing industrial
design. Using these programs to design cars, for example, has resulted
in new vehicle designs that are as crash-safe as conventional cars, yet
up to 30% lighter.
AGRICULTURE
Learning from Prairies How to Grow Food Sustainably
Take a
look at any natural ecosystem, such as a prairie, and you will see a
remarkable system of food production: productive, resilient,
self-enriching, and ultimately sustainable. The modern agricultural
practices of humankind are also enormously productive, but only in the
short term: the irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticide inputs upon which
modern food crops depend both deplete and pollute increasingly rare
water and soil resources. The Land Institute has been working
successfully to revolutionize the conceptual foundations of modern
agriculture by using natural prairies as a model: they have been
demonstrating that using deep-rooted plants which survive year-to-year
(perennials) in agricultural systems which mimic stable natural
ecosystems – rather than the weedy crops common to many modern
agricultural systems – can produce equivalent yields of grain and
maintain and even improve the water and soil resources upon which all
future agriculture depends.
