Spider webs and succulents inspire this water-collection startup. Synapse – High-Impact Biomimicry Insights. Darwinians Try to Usurp Biomimetics Popularity. How one building is changing the world. It used to be that the Bullitt Foundation “saved the planet” the old-fashioned way, putting its money behind campaigns to spare old-growth forests, stop mines in Alaska, and clean up toxic waste.
Not anymore. The Seattle-based foundation, started by local media magnate Dorothy Bullitt, has turned its attention to cities, funding projects in urban ecology, clean energy, and technology. And recently, Bullitt tried a new tack for changing the world: It built something. Not just any something: It’s what the foundation’s CEO, Denis Hayes, calls “the most efficient office building in the world, and likely the most efficient building in the world, period.” And roughly a year and a half after it opened for business, the building is making waves as effectively as any grant could have done. Just ask chemist Tom Schneider, director of product development at the Portland, Ore. It wasn’t good enough for Bullitt. The Bullitt Center’s impacts go beyond weather sealants. Request a Speaker. Incredible new tech inspired by biology.
Could the secret to the next big technological breakthrough be all around us -- slithering, crawling or flowering among our natural surroundings?
More than ever, scientists and designers are looking to nature to emulate the ingenuity of the living world.
DesignLens Supplement: Biomimicry Thinking Approaches. Life’s Principles. Hunting & Gathering For Ideas. “Seeing” Function. Beyond benign : green chemistry curriculum. Green Chemistry Online Course for Educators Green Chemistry is the science of creating safe, energy efficient and non-toxic products and processes and offers a concrete path towards solving the environmental problems our society faces today.
This course begins with an introduction to the 12 principles of green chemistry and then concentrates on the exploration and creation of green chemistry lesson plan materials. Educational resources that are proven vehicles for bringing green chemistry concepts to high school students will be introduced. These lesson plans are designed to integrate into current curriculum and meet national education standards in science and connecting disciplines.
The materials are designed for high-tech, low-tech and no-tech implementation so that teachers withvarying resources have an avenue for implementation. Implementing Biomimicry and Sustainable Design with an Emphasis on the Application of Ecological Principles - Curricular Unit. Curricular Unit: Implementing Biomimicry and Sustainable Design with an Emphasis on the Application of Ecological Principles This unit provides students with an opportunity to study ecological relationships with an emphasis on the Sonoran Desert.
Students appreciate the complexity and balance that supports the exchange of energy and matter within food webs. Species adaptations are examined. Students then apply these natural relationships to the study of biomimicry and sustainable design. They study the flight patterns of birds and relate their functional design to aeronautical engineering. Biomimetics. One cloudless midsummer day in February, Andrew Parker, an evolutionary biologist, knelt in the baking red sand of the Australian outback just south of Alice Springs and eased the right hind leg of a thorny devil into a dish of water.
Biomimicry. Biomimicry: Emulating Nature’s Genius. While looking for her just-published book in a bookstore, biologist Janine M.
Benyus was asked by the clerk what it was about. She responded instinctually, head swimming with all the ideas she had worked with while writing. Leaf-Mimicking Design Boosts Output of Solar Panels. Vascular Channels Based On Plant Leaves Allow For Self-Healing In New Solar Cells. Clean Power Published on August 15th, 2013 | by James Ayre Self-healing solar cells — possessing “vascular” networks similar to those in plant leaves — have now been created by researchers from North Carolina State University.
The new solar cells are able to effectively and inexpensively restore themselves to optimal functioning thanks to their possession of a “network of channels” which mimics the organic vascular systems found in most plants. North Carolina State University explains: In their new paper, the researchers show that creating solar cell devices with channels that mimic organic vascular systems can effectively reinvigorate solar cells whose performance deteriorates due to degradation by the sun’s ultraviolet rays. “The design of NC State’s regenerative solar cell mimics nature by use of microfluidic channels.”Image Credit: North Carolina State University The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy. About the Author. Symbiosis by Taryn Mead on Prezi. How butterfly wings can inspire new high-tech surfaces (11/10/2012)
A South American butterfly flapped its wings, and caused a flurry of nanotechnology research to happen in Ohio.
Researchers here have taken a new look at butterfly wings and rice leaves, and learned things about their microscopic texture that could improve a variety of products. For example, the researchers were able to clean up to 85 percent of dust off a coated plastic surface that mimicked the texture of a butterfly wing, compared to only 70 percent off a flat surface. In a recent issue of the journal Soft Matter, the Ohio State University engineers report that the textures enhance fluid flow and prevent surfaces from getting dirty - characteristics that could be mimicked in high-tech surfaces for aircraft and watercraft, pipelines, and medical equipment.
Ask Nature Nuggets. We are the global leader in biomimicry innovation consulting, professional training, and educational program and curricula development. Our mission is to train, equip, and connect engineers, educators, architects, designers, business leaders, and other innovators to sustainably emulate nature's 3.8 billion years of brilliant designs and strategies. Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new discipline that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. 14 Best Inventions Using Biomimicry in 2011 (Videos) © Ohio State University We love biomimicry news.
There is something satisfying about the natural world telling us how to make our technology better, rather than the often-assumed other way around. This year seems to have given us a bumper crop of news stories about biomimicry innovations and we have selected some of the most interesting robots, materials, structures and strategies to highlight here. 1. Super-Slippery Material for Bottles and Pipes Mimicked After Carnivorous Plant LeavesBiomimicry is everywhere, but let's start in the plant world where recently scientists used the slick leaves of a carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher plant as the inspiration behind a new material that can coat items to keep the contents from sticking to them. 2.
ICD/ITKE University of Stuttgart /via. Biomimicry News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - Gizmodo. San Diego Zoo Bioinspiration News. BiomimicryNews.com - Biomimicry News.
TED talks related to Biomimicry. Biomimicry 3.8. Youth Education / K-12. In one sense, education is passing the important lessons learned by one generation on to the next.
