“I think the biggest innovations in the 21st Century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning.”
— Steve Jobs
Life on Earth has been around for more than 3.5 billion years while humans have been around for around 100,000. While we are relatively younger as a species, we have advanced to a level where we have a great impact on our ecosystem. Harsh environments, forced chemical reactions and a whole lot of heavy machinery have fueled our modern world. They have brought about a comfortable way of living and fathered incredible innovations. However, our current path towards technological prowess is an unsustainable one. There are alternative ways to innovate that work with nature, instead of against it.
We are not living as life has learned to live on Earth.
Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. It is the practice of consulting nature before designing a solution for complex human problems. It is the practice of identifying the problem you want to tackle and find out how nature went about solving it. Biomimicry is about turning to nature to find a better model of adaptation, learn nature’s strategies to create lasting social change and to look at life around us and see how they have created a sustainable world.
Living Life, Conducive to Life
To create technology that is favorable to life, we need to understand how life on Earth lives and sustains. If we recognize the genius around us, it brings us closer to understanding it and learning from it.
Success in nature is not defined by keeping your immediate offspring alive. It is about creating an environment where a thousand generations of offspring can thrive. Nature has proved to be adept at this. There are several examples of the evolution of traits in organisms to adapt to the changes in the environment. For instance, the evolution of the peppered moth was a direct consequence of air pollution caused by the industrial revolution.
Before the industrial revolution, the peppered moth was majorly white-bodied. This allowed them to blend in with light-colored lichen and tree bark. During the industrial revolution, large amounts of pollutants in the air caused the tree barks to darken. During this time, the light-colored moths were easily detected by predators as they stood out in contrast against the darker trees.
Selective evolution favored the dark-colored moth and their population rapidly increased to the point where 98% of moths in Manchester, England were black. As soon as the pollution levels decreased, the white-bodied peppered moth population began to rise again. This effect was popularized under the term “industrial melanism”. This is a great example of how man-made technological changes can affect the environment, and how nature adapts to it.
Biomimicking structure
Nature constantly improves and makes its species more and more adaptable to its immediate environment. Some of these design principles can be applied to solve human problems more efficiently. Biomimicry can be implemented in a wide range of applications. Design, architecture, engineering, computer science, business are a few of the fields that can benefit from it.
Harvesting water like desert beetles
Living in the dry, arid, Namibian desert has given enough cause for some species of Darkling beetles to improvise. These beetles get the water they need to survive from dewdrops and ocean fog by sticking their rear end in the air, aiming towards the incoming sea breeze.
The shape and bumpy texture of the beetle’s body allows it to capture water droplets from the air. The shell has microscopic bumps that are hydrophilic (water-attracting) at the tips and hydrophobic (water-repelling) at the sides. The hydrophilic part causes the water droplets to accumulate on its back and the hydrophobic counterpart causes the water to run down its body directly into its mouth.
This trait has been adapted into human technology and implemented in efficient fog-catching nets. The nets that implemented this technology has proven to be ten times better at fog-catching than their predecessor. A company called NBD Nano is developing a self-filling water bottle using this technique. They predict that the bottle could collect anywhere between 0.5 to 3 liters of water per hour, depending on the local environment.
Fighting bacteria like sharks
Basking sharks are slow-moving migratory sharks with rough skin. An interesting fact about the Galapagos basking shark is the lack of bacterial growth on their skin despite their slow-moving nature. Research revealed that the skin is textured with structural patterns in the nanometer range that acts as an uncomfortable surface for bacteria to attach, colonize and form biofilms.
Superbugs are powerful bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics. They are difficult to control and treat. The best way to deal with superbugs is to prevent their formation rather than kill them. Scientists are working on mimicking the nano-structures on shark skin to create surfaces that will inhibit bacterial growth. Sharklet Technologies is a company that is developing a plastic sheet that incorporates this trait to prevent bacterial growth.
A combination of biomimetic traits in a train
The Shinkansen Bullet train is a network of high-speed railway lines in Japan with a maximum speed of 240–320 km/h. It is a highly efficient, safe mode of transport and an engineering marvel. Initially, the trains suffered from sonic boom noise while exiting tunnels with high speed which made it unsuitable for residential areas. In order to make the design more streamlined and decrease noise, Eiji Nakatsu, an engineer and birdwatcher, employed biomimicry.
The wedge-shaped bill of the Kingfisher enables splashless water entry while hunting for prey. The beak is sharp at the tip and gradually increases in diameter. This allows the water to flow along the beak instead of being pushed by it. The front of the Shinkansen train is designed based on the kingfisher’s bill.
Owls are known for their ability to fly silently as they hunt. This is made possible by the serrated and curved structure of their wing feathers. The pantograph (the part that connects the train to the electric wires) was designed to mimic the owl’s silent flight by adopting the same structure. These improvements resulted in decreased noise levels (below 70 dB) which meant that the trains could be operated in the city.
The Adélie penguin has a smooth belly that allows it to glide and swim effortlessly. The pantograph’s supporting shaft was redesigned to mimic the penguin’s body to reduce drag due to wind resistance. This combined with the nose remodel resulted in increasing the speed by 10% and used 15% less electricity.
Bio-inspired robotics
The term robot usually triggers the image of a metal body with rigid moving parts. In fact, this also inspired the dance move of the same name. However, as robots become more and more common, they also become more and more complex. The current trend in robotics is becoming less “robot-like” and more “life-like”.
Tasks such as navigation, collaborative tasks, complex movements, and so on are challenging to implement in robots while they are effortlessly executed by animals. Roboticists are currently trying to emulate the animal body framework, their movement capabilities, and skills using biomimicry techniques.
Nature commonly uses soft materials and rarely uses hard ones. So far, we have primarily used the latter to implement our robots. However, biomimicry becomes more feasible when we switch to soft materials such as silicone. This gave rise to the field of soft-robotics.
Biomimicking processes
“Stick like a gecko, compute like a cell, even run a business like a redwood forest.”
— Janine Benyus, biologist, author and innovation consultant
While the physical structure of natural elements can inspire design, we can also mimic the way things work in nature. Several modern-day applications have been derived from the methods used by plants and animals to execute certain functions.
Biomimicry in software
Several algorithms and processes in software have been inspired by how similar problems are solved in nature. These are sometimes designed to better understand the natural process itself or to model biological systems. Other times, it is done to recreate the efficiency of natural systems in computing.
Simple rules, complex behavior
Cellular automata were studied in the 1950s as a model for biological systems. A cellular automaton is a finite state machine that occupies unit space and is governed by simple rules that define how it interacts with its neighbors in discrete time. A cellular automaton will change its state based on interaction with neighbors as dictated by the rules.
In two dimensional space, the best known cellular automata is Conway’s Game of Life. Here, each cell can be “alive” (state 1) or “dead” (state 0). There were 4 simple rules that governed each automaton.
- A living cell with fewer than 2 living neighbors dies due to underpopulation.
- A living cell with 2 or 3 living neighbors stays alive.
- A living cell with more than 3 living neighbors dies due to overpopulation.
- A dead cell with exactly 3 living neighbors becomes alive due to reproduction.
The initial pattern set on the 2D discrete plane was known as the seed of the system. As time was incremented, the cellular automata interacted with their neighbors and produced behavior in accordance with the rules. Over a large period of time, they started to show emergent behavior and formed colonies which expanded into cities and so on.
Self-replicating loops and structures can also be formed using a similar logic which can be related to reproduction. This kind of behavior mimics how cells work in an organism. A single cell by itself may seem simple, but a combination of cells can form a complex organism such as a tree, a cheetah, or a human being.
Algorithms inspired by nature
One of the problems faced in computation is to find efficient paths in a network of nodes or graphs. Similar optimization challenges are observed in nature. For instance, ant colonies search for the best path to take to reach a food source. Deriving inspiration from the efficient techniques used by ants, multi-agent systems were developed to tackle optimization problems in computer science.
The predominant technique of communication in biological ants is based on pheromones. Ants that explore routes to reach food sources often deposit a trail of pheromones that they can use to find their way back. These trails also act as a path for other ants to follow. It was found that the most efficient route had the highest deposit of pheromones which meant that most ants will follow this route to reach the food source.
In computer science, a similar technique was implemented using probabilistic parameters in place of pheromones to find the best path in a graph. This was implemented to solve the traveling salesman problem, vehicle routing problem, and call routing problem as well.
Particle swarm optimization is a technique that optimizes a problem by iteratively improving a candidate solution using particles or agents that swarm towards the optimal solution in a search-space just like insects swarming to the source of the highest concentration of food.
Search algorithms such as the vortex search algorithm was formulated based on the vertical flow of stirred fluids. The search radius is decreased iteratively until it zooms in onto the optimal solution thereby forming a vortex structure.
The most popular implementation is computation using neural networks. These were modeled after the neurons present in our brains to try and match its computation capabilities. However, they are not an accurate representation of their biological counterpart. Deep learning convolutional networks are a good representation of how our visual system works. They are a great tool for application in the field of computer vision.
Biomimicking ecosystems
A more high-level version of biomimicry is when we try to emulate entire ecosystems. In nature, there are no by-products. Every processes’ byproduct is constantly upcycled into a higher stage. For instance, fungus consumed by a rat is upcycled when the rat is consumed by a bird of prey. We can strive to mimic a similar system in place in our industrial world where every industry’s byproduct is the raw material for another. This concept is called a circular economy. There are several companies that are trying to implement such practices. You can read more about some of them here.
Fractals are complex patterns that are self-similar on different scales. Fractals are widely observed in nature. They are characterized by repeatability on the microscopic as well as macroscopic scale. For example, the process of electrons spinning on their axis and revolving around the nucleus in an atom is similar to how planets revolve around the sun while rotating on their axis.
The same principles can be applied to the functioning of a society. If we want a fully functional democracy on a country-level, the same has to be observed at the home-level.
How to use biomimicry in your next project
“The people who design our world usually never take a biology class. They’re novices on how the world works.”
— Janine Benyus, biologist, author and innovation consultant
It would be wise to note that several problems that we face today have been seamlessly solved by nature. It is just a question of looking at the right sources for inspiration. We need to take the genius that is present in nature and present them to designers and innovators. The first step while designing a solution should be to ask, “Has nature solved this before?”.
AskNature is a great innovation matchmaking source. It is an online catalog of natural solutions to human design challenges. It is a library that comprises examples of how nature has overcome adverse environments and challenges by implementing smart designs and processes. This platform helps to bridge the gap between innovators and biologists.
The best way to bring about a global change in the way we design solutions is to bring together entrepreneurs who are inclined towards biomimicry and give them the right tools. The Biomimicry Global Design Challenge (hosted by the Biomimicry Institute) takes place every year where teams of students and professionals address critical global issues with nature-inspired solutions. This is one of the great platforms that advertise this cause, provides the right tools and mentorship, and also the seed funding required for startups.
Nature keeps what works and replaces what does not through evolution and adaptation. The goal is to make products, systems, processes, and civilization practically indistinguishable from the natural world. It is time to take an evolutionary leap and become functionally compatible with life.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comment section. Keep reading and supporting. Cheers!
