Biomimicry and Bullet Trains

The BBC has a roundup of some of the ways the natural world is shaping industrial design:

For instance, a Canadian firm Whirlpower mimics humpback whale flippers and uses the principle on wind turbines and fans, reducing the drag and increasing the lift.

A paint company Lodafen applies the lotus effect, mimicking the shape of the bump on a lotus leaf.

Lotus leaves are self-cleaning – they have tiny bumps that help remove the dirt when it rains.

Lodafen uses the principle in architecture designs – and in Europe, there are more than 350,000 buildings that have this kind of paint.

The design of the fastest train in the world, Shinkansen bullet train in Japan, was inspired by the beak of a kingfisher.

“And of course the high-speed train, Shinkansen bullet train in Japan – it’s the fastest train in the world, traveling 200 miles per hour.

“Instead of having a rounded front, it has something that looks like a beak of a kingfisher, a bird that goes from air to water, one density of medium to another,” she adds.

You can read the full article here.

And digging through the debris in my office, I just came across another roundup from an airline magazine, Hemispheres, back in January.  The writer is Tiffany Meyers:

When Kaichang Li, a science professor at Oregon State University, discovered that the blue mussel’s sticky fibers resemble soy flour’s proteins, he developed a nontoxic, soy-flour- based adhesive, called PureBond Technology. For Columbia Forest Products, manufacturer of hardwood plywood and veneer, it was the end of a competitive scramble to find an alternative to the pricey, carcinogenic industry standard: urea- formaldehyde-based glue.

Nature-inspired design might even correct our overindulgences. The intemperate use of antibiotics has given rise to drug-resistant bacteria like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a “superbug” that causes difficult-to-treat, drug-resistant infections and beleaguers hospitals. In 2005, MRSA killed more than 19,000 people in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control. The cure? Sharks.

Fighting Back in the New War on Rhinos

Here’s the story I reported from South Africa earlier this year.  It’s now out in the November Smithsonian:

Johannesburg’s international airport is an easy place to get lost in the crowd, and that’s what a 29-year-old Vietnamese man named Xuan Hoang was hoping to do one day in March last year—just lie low till he could board his flight home.  The police dog sniffing down the line of passengers didn’t worry him; he’d checked his baggage through to Ho Chi Minh City.  But behind the scenes, police were also manning the x-ray scanners on flights to Vietnam, believed to be the epicenter of a new war on rhinos.  And when Hoang’s bag appeared on the screen, they saw the unmistakable shape of rhinoceros horns—six of them, weighing more than 35 pounds and worth up to $500,000.

Investigators suspected the contraband might be linked to a poaching incident a few days earlier on a game farm in Limpopo Province, on the country’s northern border.  “We have learned over time, as soon as a rhino goes down, in the next two or three days the horns will leave the country,” said police Col. Johan Jooste of South Africa’s national priority crime unit, when I interviewed him recently in Pretoria.

The Limpopo rhinos had been killed in a “chemical poaching,” meaning that hunters, probably traveling by helicopter, shot them with a dart gun loaded with an overdose of veterinary tranquilizers.  As the price of rhino horn has soared, said Jooste, a short, thickly-built bull of a cop, so has the involvement of sophisticated criminal syndicates.

“The couriers are like drug mules, specifically recruited to come into South Africa on holiday.  All they know is that they need to pack for one or two days. They come in here with minimal contact details, sometimes with just a mobile phone, and they meet with guys providing the horns. They discard the phone so there’s no way to trace it to any other people.”

Police were not sure they would be able to send Hoang away for serious jail time, much less get to the professionals who had hired him. South African courts often require police not just to catch someone smuggling rhino horns, but actually connect the horns to a specific poaching incident.   “In the past,” said Jooste, “we needed to physically fit a horn on a skull to see if we had a match.  But that was not always possible, because we didn’t have the skull, or it was cut too cleanly.”

Taking the sample for DNA analysis

Police sent the horns confiscated at the airport to Cindy Harper, head of the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of Pretoria. Getting a match with DNA testing had never worked in the past.

The Sociopathological Architect

Ponti's Prison

I don’t normally write about architecture here because it seems off-topic.  But buildings certainly change our behavior, and I think about that every time I go near one.

So this morning I went looking for the Denver Art Museum and instead found what I took to be a prison, the museum’s North Building, opened in 1971.  The woman at the desk inside explained that Italian architect Gio Ponti had intended it to look like a castle, complete with slit windows, because he thought art needed to be locked up and safeguarded.  ”If a museum has to protect works of art,” he pronounced, “isn’t it only right that it should be a castle?”  The original design actually included a moat.  Ponti’s main entrance, now closed off, is a cylinder that feels like an airlock between alien worlds, art within, drooling masses outside.

Once you manage to find your way in, oddly, the interior is incredibly homey, with warm colors on the walls, and easy chairs arranged in little groupings for people to sit and chat, or just contemplate the art before them.  I have rarely felt more comfortable in a museum.

Libeskind's shipwreck

So then I wandered over to the museum’s new addition, named after some benefactor and designed by Daniel Libeskind.  If Ponti thought it was his job to shut out the city, Libeskind seems to think his job is to make war on it.  His building is a jumble of jagged edges, threatening everything around it. Instead of inviting you to come in, it roars at you to keep your distance:  Don’t touch me.  It’s also covered in highly reflective metal, so you can barely even look at it by day.    Inside, function is similarly distorted by form.  The walls and ceilings everywhere skew toward you or away from you, making it hard to figure out where you are in the building, and where you should be going next.  I found it extremely difficult to just stand still and look at the art, because even standing still, I felt motion sickness coming on.  Libeskind clearly wants us to know that he is an artist, indeed, the artist, above all others, not merely someone who sets the scene.

God save us from such architects.

Seahorses in the Sewer

Eat your words, Boris Johnson.  You pronounce nature dead and, boom, she comes roaring back.  Last week, Johnson, who is London's mayor, was complaining about the state of the River Thames.  This week, seahorses turn up not just in the Thames, but practically waggling their tails at Traitor's Gate. Here's the report from The Independent:

Seahorses, the distinctive horse-headed small fish typically found in tropical seas and on coral reefs, are thought to be breeding in the River Thames in London, the Environment Agency announced yesterday.

A juvenile short-snouted seahorse, Hippocampus hippocampus, was recently found in the river at

A Lesson for London from Milwaukee

London’s Mayor Boris Johnson says his city is lapsing back to the Great Stink of 1858. The city’s sewerage system, built for a city of 2.5 million people, cannot handle the present population of 8 million, and every time the skies add in just two millimeters–less than a tenth of an inch–of rain, the”Bazalgette Interceptors” break open and raw sewage pours into the river.  Johnson writes:

In one of the crimes for which we are truly all guilty, society is now discharging an awful 50 million tons of raw sewage into the river in London alone, and unless we are bold in our plans, that figure will rise to 70 million tons in 10 years…

When Bazalgette designed his interceptors, in response to the Great Stink of 1858, he assumed that they would only kick into action in emergencies – truly torrential downpours of a kind that happen once or twice a year.

Now it happens 50 times a year, basically once a week.  Johnson says the answer is massive infrastructure improvements, conceived and built with “neo-Victorian boldness”:

That is why it is time to recognise that we can no longer rely on