Lobsters are master sniffers. In complete watery darkness they are able to smell and locate food, mates, or predators. This ability comes from a pair of antenna which they swing about to capture traces of odor molecules.
Technical application:
sensors
Continue reading lobster inspired sensors will detect gas, bacteria or mines
Perhaps you recall seeing a reed-like plant growing near a pond or wetland. The plant stem has several telescoping sections which can be pulled apart and reconnected. It is commonly called horsetail, snake grass, or puzzlegrass. Named Equisetum, this is the only living member of a family of plants that reproduce by spores instead of seeds. The horsetail is called a living fossil with similar fossils in Paleozoic rock layers dated at 100 million years old. In truth, all plants were created on Day 3 of the Creation Week just thousands of years ago.
Technical application:
logarithm chart
We are all familiar with table salt, or sodium chloride (NaCl). This essential, common compound is ordinarily crystalline and brittle in nature. However, many materials behave strangely on the scale of minute quantities, and salt is no e
xception. Researchers at Boston College have explored tiny salt samples at close distance using an atomic force microscope.
Technical application:
high speed data transfer
Continue reading Salt-Nano wire for high speed data transfer
A tsunami is an ocean disturbance resulting from seismic movement of the sea floor. A wave results and moves across the ocean surface at hundreds of miles per hour. In deep water the passing wave may be only a foot or less in height. Approaching the shallow shoreline, ho
wever, the wave becomes large with resulting flood danger and destruction.
Technical application:
Tsunami warning
With the eMotionSpheres, Festo shows how several flying objects can move in a coordinated manner and within a defined space. Whether individually or collectively – even in chaotic situations, there are no collisions as the spheres move out of each other’s way.
Technical application:
coordinate swarms
At first, we strenuously observed crystals of tap water, river water, and lake water. From the tap water we could not get any beautiful crystals. We could not get any beautiful ones from rivers and lakes near big cities, either.
Technical application:
memory storage, health care applications
Continue reading Use water as a memory storage for computers?
REGEN Energy is a technology company, founded on the basis of biomimicry, whose founders set out to
transform the energy efficiency landscape and develop a sophisticated new energy management technology
based on the communication patterns of honeybees.
Technical application:
organize complex power grids
Certain spiders protect their delicately crafted insect nets with a special silk rope that reflects ultraviolet rays. Birds can see the ultraviolet rays and recognize the webs as obstacles they should avoid.
If engineers can reproduce the effect, it might save birds from their occasional accidental suicide runs into glassy buildings. German engineers at Arnold Glas copied the spiders and glazed their Ornilux-brand glass with a web-like pattern of ultraviolet-reflecting coating to save the birds from high-speed headaches.
Technical application:
innovative glas against birds collision
Insects have a wide field of view and are acutely sensitive to motion, as anyone who has tried chasing a housefly knows. Researchers have now c
reated a digital camera that mimics the curved, compound structure of an insect eye. These cameras could be used where wide viewing angles are important and space is at a premium — in advanced surveillance systems, for example, or in unmanned flying vehicles and endoscopes.
Technical application:
theater, giga-pix camera
Many processes in organisms based on the self-organization of biological components. For materials scientists, such substances are a dream: you react autonomously to their environment and can adapt to this different conditions. At the U.S. MIT researchers aim to produce such wonders molecules artificially.
Technical application:
self healing materials