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SYDNEY: Nature is inspirational, say designers who’ve trawled the living world in the search for clever ideas to rip off. “Nature has been developing sustainable technologies for almost four billion years” says Sam Stier of the Biomimicry Institute in Missoula, USA. “Ten to 100 million species have a lot to teach us.” First coined as a name in the 1950s, biomimicry is found in some surprising places. Here are eight of our favourite innovations.
1. BURRY BEGINNINGS
One of the most well known examples was born in the 1940s, when a sticky seed, called a cocklebur, attached to the tail of a Swiss dog. Georges de Mestral, the dog’s master and an engineer, pondered how the little seeds achieved such a firm grip. On examination under a microscope de Mestral noticed the nifty hook-and-loop system, which we now know so well. Thoroughly sick of fiddly fastenings, he went on to develop Velcro.
2. STICKING AROUND
Imagine an adhesive strong enough to let you hang from a glass ceiling by one hand. The sticking power of a gecko’s foot is naturally this strong. To take advantage of the design, researchers at the University of Manchester, in England, succeeded in 2003 in creating a tape containing billions of miniature plastic fibres. These use electromagnetic forces to adhere to a surface. It’s not yet available to buy, but so-called ‘gecko tape’ would be toxin free and recyclable.
3. FRICTION FREE
When a smooth object travels quickly through water, the water breaks up into little currents that slow the object down. In the quest for speed, sharks got around this problem a long time ago; the surface of sharkskin has tiny scales with ribs running along them, channelling the water. In 2000, Speedo incorporated similar textures in their ‘fastskin’ competitive swimsuits. The company says that 13 of the 15 world records broken at the 2000 Sydney Olympics were broken by swimmers wearing these suits.
4. LOTUS POWER
In 1997 Wilhelm Barthlott, a University of Bonn botanist, sought benign alternatives to toxic cleaning detergents. Realising that plants need to stay clean in order to capture sunlight (and don’t have access to detergents or elbow grease), he looked to the leaves of the lotus plant. Under the microscope he discovered tiny water-repellent surface structures that lead to a property known as ‘superhydrophobicity’ – water simply forms a ball and rolls off, taking any surface dirt along with it. Now the design has been mimicked to create self-cleaning paints and finishes.
5. SPEEDING BULLET
Japan’s trains are the fastest in the world and can travel at up to 300 km/h. But after the West Japan Railway Company introduced the Shinkansen Bullet Train, residents near the train lines began to complain, because as the locomotives emerged from tunnels, they’d create tremendous claps of noise. An unusual solution came from the beak of the kingfisher - kingfishers swoop from the air into water, producing very little splash. With beak-inspired noses, Japan’s next generation of bullet trains are not only quieter, they travel 10 % faster and used 15 % less electricity to boot.
6. ON REFLECTION
Every surface reflects some of the light that hits it – even transparent glass. This phenomenon can be incredibly frustrating if you’re reading off a glary computer screen or trying to collect light. Night-flying moths face a similar challenge, as their eyes must scavenge as much light as possible. To deal with the challenge, the surface of a moth’s eye has evolved tiny protrusions that minimise reflection. British company MacDermid Autoflex has copied the structure to create anti-reflective film, now used in computer and mobile phone screens and under development to improve the efficiency of solar panels.
7. TREE HOUSE
When designing a building for Melbourne City Council, Zimbabwean architect Mick Pearce was inspired by trees. Like leaves on a tree, windows at the top of the building are small because there is plenty of light, while those further down get larger. Something like roots, the building taps into an underground water source (Melbourne’s wastewater), which is treated and used in toilets and the cooling system. Opened in late 2006, the building uses only 7 % of the energy of the former Council House. Another of Pearce’s buildings, in the Zimbabwean capital Harare, uses cooling technology inspired by termite mounds.
8. WHALE OF A TAIL
Though they are as large as buses, humpback whales twist and turn with ease, using their flippers to pirouette and turn tight corners at extremely low speeds. By contrast, man-made machines with flipper-like blades, such as a fan or wind turbine, will often stall when slow-moving air passes over them. The key to a whale’s fine control is its tubercles; bumps that run along the pectoral flippers - but the exact reason for why they work remains unclear. Canadian company WhalePower has created and successfully tested wind turbine blade with tubercles, which they reported in January could boost energy production by 20%.
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