Mother (Nature) Knows Best — The Wild Focus Project

We humans have come up with a lot of cool stuff. But it doesn’t usually just come out of the blue. For millennia, we’ve been inspired by the natural world to invent, engineer, and improve.

Statue of Abbas ibn Firnas outside of (appropriately) the Bagdad airport. Image by Zaltmatchbtw.

Flight, for instance, is something that’s fascinated us since time immemorial — and countless inventors have looked at birds and thought, “Hey, maybe I could do that.” From Leonardo da Vinci’s bird automaton diagrams to Abbas ibn Firnas’s glider that predated the Wright brothers by over a thousand years, we’ve been trying to copy birds for a long, long time.

These days, this area of engineering is known as biomimicry or biomimetics — quite literally, “copying life.” And it goes way farther than flight! In this post, I’ll highlight some of my favorite examples of engineering and design inspired by the natural world.

Transportation:

A southern royal albatross in flight. Image by GRID-Arendal.

What first interested me in this topic was a news story from several years ago (back when I was researching flight for a previous post), about engineers creating airplane wings modeled off of albatross wings. Albatrosses are known for their super-efficient gliding. In rough weather, they allow their wing joints to flex and adjust to shifting winds — and the new plane wings do the same. The wing tips can freely move and respond to turbulence right away.
One of the best known stories of biomimicry is the Shinkansen, or Japanese bullet train. The first of these super fast trains had a problem: when they went through tunnels, the air in front of the train would compress, and then expand on the other side with a sudden boom. One of the engineers was an avid birdwatcher, and he noticed how kingfishers dove into water at high speeds with barely a splash. Air and water are both fluids, so they they behave in the same way — so a train that’s shaped like a kingfisher’s bill ought to slide through the air with the same efficiency. Once the redesign was done, there were no more booms, and (bonus!) the trains ran even faster.

Energy:

Check out the bumps on this humpback’s fin. Image by Whit Welles.

A prototype of a whale-y cool wind turbine blade. Image by WhalePower.

In another case of “make this thing move through fluid more efficiently,” wind turbine engineers have taken inspiration from the long, bumpy front flippers of the humpback whale. Fins and wings (which is essentially what turbine blades are) are very similar in how they move through fluids like air or water. The bumps on a humpback’s flipper help the whale cut through the water more efficiently than fins without bumps. When engineers added similar bumps to wind turbines, they generated more power with less wind, and cut down on noise.
Summers in southern Africa can be pretty intense, especially if you don’t have air conditioning. But if you’re a termite, you don’t need AC. African termites build towering nests out of mud, with air vents in certain spots that help control the temperature inside. An architect used a similar approach to design the Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe. Instead of using tons of energy to power traditional AC, this building uses massive fans to draw in cool air at the base of the building. Vents at the top (just like the ones in termite mounds) release hot air at the top.

Health

Laser-etched “scales” in the surface of a replacement joint. Image from Drexel News.

Have you ever watched a snake move and marveled at their smoothness? Their overlapping scales have a lot to do with it — and that got doctors and engineers thinking. It turns out that snake scales are just about the perfect pattern to etch onto moving parts of machines, and even better for replacement joints. Engineers can use lasers to etch overlapping scale patterns onto steel joints used in hip replacements.

Mosquitoes may not be popular, but let’s not be too quick to write them off. Not only are they a key part of many food webs, but they’re also helping medical engineers develop new kinds of needles for pain-free shots. You may not even notice a mosquito bite until it’s red and itchy and the mosquito is long gone. That’s because mosquito mouthparts are perfectly suited to make quick, clean holes with a vibrating, serrated, ultra-thin structure. The combination of the vibration and serration helps ease the proboscis — and now needles — into the skin without pain.

Everyday tools:

Burrs stick to all kinds of things in order to travel. Image by Martin Lopatka.

Another famous case of biomimicry is that of Velcro. The story goes that, back in 1941, an engineer went on a hunting trip with his dog. When they came back, his clothes and the dog were covered in prickly burrs. Upon closer inspection, the burrs turned out to be covered in tiny hooks, which were catching in the tiny loops of the knit clothing and the dog’s fur — the burrs’ system for hitching a ride to grow somewhere new. The engineer created his own version of these hooks and loops to create a “zipperless zipper.”
A more recent innovation on the “stick things together” front is the invention of gecko tape. Geckoes and other lizards have a remarkable ability to walk on just about any surface in just about any orientation, and they owe it to their wrinkly toes. All those wrinkles mean the foot has a ton of surface area and a ton of atoms all trying to stick to things (via the van der Waals force, for you chemistry and physics nerds). Engineers made a flexible material with similar wrinkles, and voila: reusable tape that sticks to all kinds of surfaces and leaves no gummy residue.

If I missed your favorite example of biomimicry, please leave a comment and tell us all about it! There are so many cool inventions that it would be impossible to list them all in one post.