See How Termites Inspired a Building that Cool Itself.
I recently came across an article from National Geographic about how a building was contructed in Zimbabwe that could actually cool itself without spending on expensive air conditioning.
There is an amazingly cool video that National Geographic has developed to explain this concept. See for yourself below —
What really intrigued me personally was the way the science was observed to work. Termites apparently actually built walls that were porous and also “breathed” nicely like “lungs” to make the termite mounds cooler.
According to this Harvard publication, “the structures act similarly to a lung, inhaling and exhaling once a day as they are heated and cooled.”
The research, which was conducted under the supervision of Applied Mathematics professor Lakshminarayan Mahadevan, “revealed that the termites’ mounds drive a convection current, which helps the release of stale air from the underground nest to the surface of the mound.”
