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.

How a Seashell Helped Deaf People Hear

I’ve written often here about the remarkable ways shellfish have altered the course of human history.  So I was intrigued to see a recent interview about how a shell inspired the invention of cochlear implants.  It appears in the Aussie magazine Cosmos, where I am an occasional contributor.  Here’s an excerpt:

During one Melbourne summer in 1977, he took his young children to the beach to escape the heat. While they were playing in the shallows, Clark noticed a seashell lying on the ground – and that its helical structure was a crude replica of the human cochlea.

Inspiration hit. He pulled up some grass blades and experimented with teasing them into the shell’s opening. Owing to their flexible tips and stiff bases, the blades slid smoothly into the tightening spiral. It revealed a simple solution to a complex problem.

Rushing back to the lab, he confirmed that wire electrodes following the same design as a grass blade would solve his problem. Designed with progressive stiffness, the electrodes could be made to travel the length of the cochlea, all the way to the nerve cells that code for speech.

This design is now the basis of the hugely successful cochlear implant, a small surgical implant that simulates hearing for the deaf by stimulation of the auditory nerve to reproduce speech. Today, more than 200,000 people have received cochlear implants in more than 100 countries.

Here are some other interesting examples of human interactions with shells.   They’re excerpts from a story I wrote for Smithsonian Magazine about shell madness, parts one, two, three, four, and five.  Better yet, check out chapter four, “Mad About Shells,” in my new book The Species Seekers:  Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (W.W. Norton, November 1).