Bio-Inspired Design

Bees are more than busy; they’re nimble, too. Despite their limited brainpower, individuals can sense what job the colony needs done and set at it instinctively. A problem with complex human infrastructure, such as the electrical grid, is that its various parts don’t talk to each other. Grid components don’t monitor the whole grid. Regen Energy turns a company’s uncommunicative power-sucking appliances and machines into a network, able to balance loads during pricey peak-power periods when electricity is expensive, or worse, unreliable. The company provides controllers that communicate wirelessly with each other to maximize efficiency, keeping every bee in the hive in sync.

Humpback whales are surprisingly agile swimmers considering each beast weighs in at about 80,000 pounds. Part of their swimming prowess may come from a row of warty ridges, called tubercles, on the front edge of their fins. Frank Fish, biology professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, discovered that by adding rows of similar bumps to turbine blades he could reduce drag and noise, increase speed to changing wind direction and boost the power harnessed by 20 percent.Fish developed the idea after he noticed bumps on a whale statue in a Boston gift shop. He assumed, incorrectly, that the artist got it wrong and that the bumps shouldn't go on the front edge of fins, which typically are straight and sharp.The bumps are now being sold on industrial fans made by Envira-North Systems and on surfboards by Fluid Earth.

Here’s yet another invention to make you paranoid that that little flying creature above your house is no ordinary bird or bat. The RoboSwift, as implied by its name, is based upon the biology of the swift, a family of birds capable of extremely fast flight. Developed by Delft University of Technology, the RoboSwift is equipped with observation cameras that might be used either to study birds, or possibly for surveillance of human activity. Wind tunnel tests have found that its flight is remarkably bird-like thanks to the ability to fold its ‘feathers’ backwards.

Velcro

After a hunting trip in the Alps in 1941, Swiss engineer George de Mestral’s dog was covered in burdock burrs. Mestral put one under his microscope and discovered a simple design of hooks that nimbly attached to fur and socks. After years of experimentation, he invented Velcro — and earned U.S. Patent 2,717,437 in September 1955. Benyus said it is probably the best-known and most commercially successful instance of biomimicry. Correction: This slide originally stated that the patent was earned in October 1952; that is when it was filed.

The 2003 Nobel Prize was awarded in part to Peter Agre of Johns Hopkins for his discovery, around 1990, of a membrane protein that allows water to pass through cell walls. The discovery of aquaporin solved a longtime problem in biochemistry. The Danish company Aquaporin has developed a new approach to seawater desalination that eschews the polymer-layering of traditional industrial films for the elegant complexity — and energy efficiency — of biological membranes.