The Biomimetics and Bioinspiration seminar has just concluded with an astounding showing of final projects based on solving problems with water access and quality. We based the project guidelines for the 4th Annual Biomimicry Student Design Challenge. Everyone's work was phenomenal and I must give my gratitude to the great people I had the pleasure to work with: Janne, You, and Jessica. Go team! I wholeheartedly recommend this class to any Temple students reading this, and for anyone outside of Temple to explore the topic more fully! If you found this stuff interesting, I suggest picking up the book that guided our discussions in class and that also had an influence on this blog, The Gecko's Foot. I learned a great deal while researching for class and this blog, and I'm definitely not done yet! My blog will continue to exist and feature bioinspired ideas, but my focus will no longer be exclusively on this. So what will I write about? Well you can always expect more superheroes. I will continue to explore the relationship between science and science fiction with examples from TV (like Star Trek, The X-Files, and Doctor Who) and many many movies. Over the summer, there will be some breakdowns of upcoming blockbusters including, but not limited to, Iron Man 3, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Man of Steel, Pacific Rim, The Wolverine, and The World's End. ...Okay, that last one may not even have any science fiction, but I'm warning you now that I'm going to watch and then constantly talk about this new Edgar Wright film anyway. Other topics will include basically any science that I come across that looks cool which will include lots of marine biology, food science, and inspiration from TED Talks. If you ever feel that I am not including enough comic book-based material, donations of gently used graphic novels and Amazon gift cards will be graciously accepted at the address listed under Contact!
Exploring this new interdisciplinary field was made all the more better with collaboration between biologists and bioengineers. I enjoyed meeting all of these folks very much, and it added a lot to the discussion to have multiple viewpoints! So thank you engineers! For your perspective, for sharing your fancy building with comfy lumbar-supportive chairs, and, most of all, for sharing a ton of free pizza after that one seminar. I have been since informed that this was a rare occurrence and not the norm, but I will continue to dream of a reality where you and I can coexist with piles of pizza, even if we only got to share that one perfect day.
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The brain is a supervillain's most valuable resource. It schemes, it plans, it designs, and it generates the jealousy or hatred or whatever emotion drives them to commit atrocities. And in the case of some supervillains, it's their only resource! The Lobe is really putting himself out there with a totally unprotected brain atop his body, but at least he HAS a body to help him move that thing around. Some villains are not so lucky either through genetic craziness or tragic accidents. These guys have no bodies, and are organically nothing but superintelligent brain matter. So of course their superintelligence understood the urgency of protecting the little gray cells, and they built robot suits to deal with that. Krang is shown here in what looks like a giant, ugly baby robot suit, and while the Brain always gets a new robot to house his mind after being decapitated by the forces of good, we see him here in only his basic life support chamber. But even in this more vulnerable state, he still has a huge, intelligent, and compassionate gorilla at his side called Monsieur Mallah to take care of him and find him a new robot body. Robotman has a much more slick-looking ride for his lobes (probably because he's actually a superhero, and they need to look good). Don't be fooled by his resemblance to Iron Man, though. There's not a whole human in that suit, just the brain of former racecar driver Cliff Steele. Regular humans are also very committed to protecting our cerebrums and cerebellums! We have the advantage of intact skulls to house our brain matter, but we still need a little help from helmets in contact sports or high speed situations like riding a motorcycle. But there's bad news for humans and supers alike: Helmets don't actually prevent concussions or brain damage! This may sound completely oxymoronic to some people, but it does make sense. Helmets are still extremely successful at protecting your skull, and very valuable because of that. It's much easier to buy a new helmet after the plastic cracks in yours, but harder to fix cracks in your bones. The thing is that helmets only protect the skull. The brain inside still moves around due to the space around it filled with cerebrospinal fluid, and the collisions between your brain and the inside of your skull are what causes concussions. This topic is discussed in a recent Science Friday podcast. So how can nature help us solve this problem? Let's start by taking a look at an animal whose head can withstand 100 times the g-force it takes to give an athlete a concussion without so much as a little dizziness. Scientists have been studying woodpecker anatomy to find out how it can handle such fast deceleration when it's banging its head 20 times a second. The woodpecker is equipped with shock-absorbing spongy layers all around its brain, and a very important section of spongy cartilage between the beak and the skull so some of the impact can be dissipated before it reaches the brain. They also don't have as much fluid around the brain, giving it less wiggle room to move around and hurt itself in confusion. This has inspired special systems of shock absorbers to protect valuable electronics like black boxes in planes or satellite debris falling from space. That's all well and good for electronics, but what about our own neural circuitry? Well, unfortunately we can't change our own skull anatomy to be more like that of the woodpecker (probably), but there is some work being done on more shock-absorbing helmets. One such venture created a cardboard-lined bicycle helmet after the creator suffered a concussion himself while cycling. The cardboard has a honeycomb like structure full of hexagonal cavities that give it strength. The fact that it's made up of cardboard and air makes it very lightweight and relatively cheap to produce. And since the cardboard is made from recycled paper, it's a WAY more environmental cushioning material than the current polystyrene petroleum products used in commercial bike helmets. What a win for bioinspiration! Please protect your heads! References:
Yoon, S.-H., & Park, S. (2011). A mechanical analysis of woodpecker drumming and its application to shock-absorbing systems. Bioinspiration biomimetics, 6(1), 016003. What purpose does a cape serve in a superhero’s wardrobe? Usually nothing except fashion. In Batman Begins however, we are shown that a cape can do more than make you look like a cheap magician. Bruce Wayne uses some fancy materials called memory cloth to turn his cape from a floppy fashion accessory into a stiff glider with the application of an electric charge. I’m sure the gritty nature of this movie required the writers to throw this in to justify giving the Dark Knight what would otherwise look like a frivolous ornament. But even worse than looking silly, a cape can be deadly! One of the greatest scenes from The Incredibles where Edna talks about the unfortunate costume designs of doomed supers, AKA “No capes!” Even Watchmen hits on this theme when it shows the violent demise of Dollar Bill after he gets stuck in a revolving door. So how could you balance the utility with the inconvenience of a long flowy piece of fabric? Fold it up when you don’t need it! Nature is full of examples of reversible folding. When leaves appear in the spring, they don’t just grow very quickly. They are fully formed in the bud, and then unfurl all at once when the timing is right. Mathematicians, physicists, and engineers have started noticing these intricate packaging patterns in biological materials and trying to apply them to their own work. The Japanese art of origami has had a resurgence not just among artists, but also scientists as a way to discover new folds and test designs. One cool application of origami-science has been realized in the deployment of solar panels for space vessels. And I think the greatest thing we’ve gotten out of studying folding is figuring out how to make it easy and reversible! Umbrellas partially demonstrate this idea since they have two stable states and always fold and unfold in the same predictable pattern, but they need quite a bit of force to transition. The people in this video demonstrate how easy it is to fold and unfold a design named the Miura-ori. The most important part is that we’re going between something map-sized and something that will fit in your pocket in a matter of seconds. Insects are masters of reversible folding with their wings. Beetles are one of the best examples because they need to transition between flying and walking so frequently. When they walk on the ground, they risk their wings getting caught or damaged, so they tuck them neatly under a protective shell until they need to fly again. And this is exactly the mechanism I propose for superheroes that actually use capes for flight or protection! Fold it up, and then deploy it on demand. This, by the way, is most of the premise of the short-lived NBC series The Cape. Heroes could possibly even keep their entire costume folded up for a speedy wardrobe change during a crisis. Peter Parker’s backpack could unfurl into Spidey-spandex, or Superman could carry around his own collapsible phone booth for privacy on the go. These are kind of silly examples, but think of all the other ways you could make life easier with simple repeatable folding patterns. Sky divers need professionals to pack up their parachutes correctly, but what if it was designed so you could fold it yourself? A pop-up tent that fits in a small bag would be great for long hikes, or getting emergency shelters to disaster-stricken areas quickly and efficiently. Strollers and all of those other baby furniture accessories could definitely be improved if they could be packed into the car that much faster. Problem-solving by paper-folding!
Swarm robotics is a growing field of engineering that focuses on getting many small robots to work together. Much of the simple reasoning each robot uses and the rules for group coordination are modeled after superorganisms like bee colonies or flocks of birds. These animals are able to combine the efforts of hundreds of individuals towards a single task, without getting in anyone’s way or using telepathy. And although robotic technicians keep assuring me that they have noble goals for their work that will help humanity, I can’t help but keep picturing a supervillain with an army of tiny autonomous robots at his or her disposal... Some swarm-y villains include Marvel’s Gah Lak Tus. The original world-devourer Galactus was a giant individual, but this new generation version is a collection of robots that invades planets. There’s another Marvel villain known as The Swarm, but he’s made up of actual bees, not bee-like robots. I had a surprisingly difficult time finding any more comic examples of such villainy with a cursory Google search, but there are lots of robot swarms to be found elsewhere in pop culture. One famous example is Michael Crichton’s novel Prey about self-replicating nanorobots that take over the world in a sinister mass of "grey goo". Many of the reasons robot swarms would be helpful to us are also tools that could be used for evil. Small autonomous robots are invaluable in being able to enter unstable or radioactive buildings to gather information, find trapped people, or bring back samples. On the other hand, the same idea could be used for a nefarious purposes to map out the defenses and terrain of the next place to be invaded. There is an episode of The X-Files about robotic cockroaches of alien origin looking for sources of methane they can harvest should their creators choose to visit. The Cybermen from Doctor Who run a similar gambit in ”Closing Time” when they release silver rat-like Cybermats to scout out power sources and siphon electricity to the ship they’re trying to repair. The Cybermen themselves bear some resemblances to eusocial insects in that they all work together and follow one supreme CyberKing or CyberQueen for the communal success of their species. Cybermen come into being by assimilating real living people into robot suits and altering their brains to be more obedient and without emotions. Another famous race of robot hybrids that enjoy assimilating their foes (as famous as sci-fi TV shows get anyway) are the Borg from Star Trek: The Borg also demonstrates a collective conscious know in sci-fi as a hive mind, and the term, of course, originates from the seemingly telepathic qualities of bee hives. If there are any real nerds reading this blog, they're starting to question my logic. However, we're straying a little off topic since the Borg is a group of human-machine cyborgs, not purely robotic swarms. But one of the tools they use to assimilate others is a swarm of tiny robots! They inject these nanites into the bloodstreams of the person they are converting. The nanites rebuild the person from the inside out with new mechanical parts. This is actually one of the goals of swarm robotics: to create nanorobots that could diagnose and medically treat a patient from the inside. I'm hoping by then though that our technology allows us to create much friendlier-looking robots like the nanites from Mystery Science Theater 3000. We use rules that we know about swarm behavior to design robot protocols. Trying to program 20 robots to follow centralized commands would take too much time and computer power, but you can get the same group results by just telling each robot how close it should be to its neighbors and who to follow. This TED talk goes in depth in showing how they got tiny robocopters to play nicely with one another. It’s long, but make sure you at least watch the great clips at the end showing cool flight formations and a music video! Those robots were quadcopters, the only bioinspiration involved was in creating the cooperative behavior. Many scientists and engineers are working on more biomimetic, flapping flying robots, but insects' wing maneuvers are so complicated that it's not going to happen overnight. Here's some of the progress that has been made on a microaerial vehicle (MAV) at Harvard: Swarm robotics is a new enough field that it is a two-way street between the science and the actual engineering. We’re still figuring out how individual ants or bees make decisions, and one way to explore that is by building robot models that mimic insect behavior. In some recent research, investigators were trying to determine if ants used complicated angular math to figure out what the most efficient route is to take, but it turns out they just followed each other and didn’t need the math at all. Here’s avideo of little robots following the light trails that other robots create (similar to ants laying a chemical trail for its nestmates). By mapping out the efficiency of the communication among superorganisms, engineers can design better traffic patterns to avoid traffic jams and collisions. It’s also an idea that will get us one step closer to self-driving cars, which I personally look forward to. After all this you might start feeling a little concerned about your safety and privacy in an increasingly robot-filled world. Drones fly through the air spying on you, there are robotic flies on the wall watching your every move, and soon even your car may turn on you! Don't worry though, I'm sure the water is still safe. ...Right? Yes folks, it’s the post you’ve been waiting for at long last! Spider-man was my first inspiration for making this blog because he’s such an obvious model for biomimetics. I had heard long ago that scientists were trying to harness the strength of spider silk for commercial production of bullet proof vests and other materials, and even longer before that everyone who read Marvel comics knew Peter Parker had already achieved that feat. Those of you more familiar with the Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi Spider-Man franchise (2002-2007) might be questioning my choice of phrase. “But he was just a genetic mutant that created spider silk through a freak accident, he didn’t engineer anything!” In the original comic story, and recreated in the 2012 movie The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker designs and manufactures his own synthetic web shooters. He IS a physics prodigy after all, he might as well put that genius to work! My first forays into researching spider silk on the web (all puns intended) taught me that this product is FAR more complicated than I had first imagined. First I thought, “Why not just domesticate spiders for mass silk production? That makes sense.” When humans decided we liked meat and milk, we fattened up a bunch of docile cows and concentrated them in a small area. This is how we get natural silk now from silkworms, the only domesticated insect. So let’s grab a bunch of spiders, put them in a room with enough insects to keep them happily fed, then sit back and reel in the silk. Well that’s not going to work out. Spiders are territorial and aggressive first of all, and secondly there’s a reason humans almost never domesticate carnivorous animals. It takes too much effort on its own to feed them, and when they get hungry they can eat each other! There have been examples of people harvesting enough silk straight from spiders to make some beautiful clothing, but it takes impractical amounts of time, money, and patience. For instance, this cape was made entirely from golden orb weaver spider silk (which is naturally golden, nothing was dyed). It’s just one cape, that can’t take too long to make, right? WRONG. A whopping eight years and 1.2 million spiders were invested into this one exquisite item of clothing. [new approach needed] In the last few decades we have a new tool available to us to combine desirable attributes of different organisms: splicing genes! Spider silk is just made of protein, so the instructions are directly coded into the DNA. This should be an easy solution to our farming problem, cut and paste the dragline silk gene into something docile like a bacterium, goat, or silkworm. What could possibly go wrong? Yes spider silk is composed of just protein, but it’s one really big protein. So big that the other organisms we’ve engineered can’t express the full protein before giving up. Part of the problem is that the spider silk gene is composed of a lot of repeated amino acid sequences, like having dozens of glycines in a row. Spider cells are prepared for this repetition, but other cells run out of the required tRNAs, truncating translation prematurely. We’ve made progress over the decades, but we haven’t quite gotten a domesticated animal to fully produce the desired quality and quantity of silk. There’s also an informativeTED Talk about spider silk that covers the different varieties of silk and some of the problems we’ve run into with genetic engineering. We already have some good substitute composites for spider silk, namely nylon and Kevlar. These materials have great resilience and strength, but the problem comes from the harsh chemicals and solvents needed for their production. The hope is that spider silk will inspire us to find a more natural, environmentally-friendly production method. So why do we keep trying to nail down this slippery substance? Because it’s still one of the coolest materials out there! To demonstrate, remember this scene from Spider-Man 2? Some very cool scientists went ahead and calculated if this would be possible using spider silk attached to a human-sized spool of silk. It would take 300,000N of force, and Darwin’s bark spider produces dragline silk with such a capacity for stopping trains.
Clearly, comic-based science is a growing field. Can we set up a conference for this? Reference: Chung, H., Kim, T. Y., & Lee, S. Y. (2012). Recent advances in production of recombinant spider silk proteins. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, (0). Elsevier Ltd. While enhanced smell capabilities have never made a hero on their own, there are a number of animal-resembling superheroes gifted with the ability of super-sniffing. Some notable examples are Sabertooth and Wolverine: Super-smell is an admittedly weird power for some heroes to have, but it definitely comes in handy. What do you think of first when you need to camouflage yourself or be sneaky? Be quiet, stay in the dark, and generally hide yourself from being seen or heard. It doesn’t normally occur to you to disguise your scent unless you know bloodhounds are actively chasing you. So in a situation like this, having enhanced olfactory senses can really throw a wrench into someone else’s plans. Wolverine stays one step ahead of an ambush if the wind is blowing in the right direction, and he’s one of the only people who can detect Mystique through all of her shape-shifting because she can't mask her scent. Smell is also unique in being closely connected to the memory centers of our brain. Seeing a face or hearing a particular song that reminds you of a past event can summon a level of nostalgia, but nothing to match the visceral pull you experience after catching a waft of a familiar perfume. The smell of a baking apple pie could bring back strong memories of the holidays at home, or conversely the scent of shellfish could conjure up a wave of nausea when you remember that time you got food poisoning. Many mammals’ olfactory talents have been recognized by humans, and we’ve trained them to help us detect trace indicators. Bomb and drug sniffing dogs are probably the most familiar to you, but there are also rats that have been trained to smell tuberculosis. And let's not forget about truffle-hunting pigs snooping for delectable fungi. There are some ideas out there of how to turn natural smell receptors into an electronic sensor for commercial application, but for now, we’re limited to training pooches to bark at suspicious luggage. If any smell scientists out there need inspiration for their next project, I have an idea for you: SMELL-O-VISION Seriously. You’ve probably gathered from my posts thusfar that I’m a bit of a cinema junkie. I didn't get caught up in the 3D, high-definition craze that’s been going for the last few years because in many cases visual quality is being valued over the actual quality of the writing and acting, but I appreciate the technological push to bring us more realism in our viewing experiences. And I want us to take it a step further with smell-o-vision! I don’t know how, and I don’t know if much of the average movie-going audience would even want such a thing, but I think it would be awesome. You would feel so immersed in the scene. Directors would have another tool for creating their milieu. And while I know most of you will not agree, it’s the unpleasant odors that are really missing from my experience. My favorite movies bring out dark, strong emotions I'm lucky enough not to feel in my daily life, and what could get that message across better than smelling the dank fumes of poverty or the acrid smoke of war. It would be an incredible resource for documentaries that really want you to feel what others are feeling. If people would rather not have unpleasant odors, pleasant and exotic new scents would also be a boon to cinephiles. Humans have a paucity of vocabulary to describe smells that have never been smelled before, so smell-o-vision could bring new fruits and flowers to life in our scent-memory. And you absolutely must have a rich collection of scents to draw on if you want to sound fancy at a wine tasting. For those of you rolling your eyes at my weird obsession, there are good, solid, medical reasons to work on olfaction and standardizing smell experience/vocabulary. It's been found in recent years that people's sense of smell becomes impaired when they are suffering from a neurodegenerative disease. It's completely logical that senses would suffer as much as the rest of the brain's functions, but we've only just realized that a smell abilities are an effective diagnostic tool for diseases like Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's. Simple questions like "Does pizza smell the same as it used to?" could be physicians' first clue to the existence of a deeper problem in a patient. Just like turning up the volume on your TV is often a sign of hearing loss, having to adjust the scent projector on your smell-o-vision could be a reminder to visit your neurologist. The first attempts at this were made in the 60s where the theatre was rigged with jets that released over 30 different odors. Audience members complained that the jets were too loud and the scent would only reach them a several minutes after the action. In more recent decades these problems were remedied with special scratch-n-sniff cards released with the movie. Easy to enjoy in your home at your own pace! I definitely remember a few TV shows and movies doing special promotions with scratch-n-sniff cards that I begged my parents to get for me. Totally worth it. I suppose as far as biomimicry goes however, we’ll more likely be focusing on something closer the Spleen’s powers to achieve smell-projection. Reference:
Ruan, Y., Zheng, X.-Y., Zhang, H.-L., Zhu, W. and Zhu, J. (2012), Olfactory dysfunctions in neurodegenerative disorders. J. Neurosci. Res., 90: 1693–1700. doi: 10.1002/jnr.23054 Invisibility is the most requested superpower after flight. It has endless applications from espionage to theft to avoiding your boss when you want to leave early on Friday. And there are lots of superhero examples accordingly, with one of the best being Invisible Girl from the Fantastic Four: One logical drawback of her ability is that only her body can become invisible, not her clothing (with the exception of her specially designed supersuit). If that sounds familiar, you’ve probably also seen The Incredibles. It’s the Pixar version of the Fantastic Four, and my recommendation if you can only pick one movie of those two to watch. Violet is the Pixar analog of Invisible Girl. I’m not going to try to discuss or explain Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, but please enjoy this hilarious representation from the 70’s TV show anyway. And if I may step out of comic-inspired characters for a moment, I can’t possibly write about invisibility without bringing up the Invisible Man (spectacular in both the H.G. Wells novel and the 1933 movie). Going completely transparent sounds like quite a task that even biomimicry cannot solve. But let’s look closer at the mechanism behind this disappearing act: camouflaging pigments to match the surrounding environment exactly. That sounds precisely like my next favorite topic of discussion after superheroes: cephalopods! Squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish have the most remarkable skin qualities that let them blend into their environment. Watch this video and play “find the octopus before it finds you.” Amazing right? How do cephalopods achieve such rapid color and texture changes? The have specialized cells called chromatophores that they control with tiny muscles. The octopus can contract or expand these little pigment sacs on command to make one color dominate the others. One of the coolest things discovered about these chromatophores is that they respond to music when electrically stimulated. This falls under the scientific category of "I can't believe people get to do this stuff!" A special species in Indonesia known as the mimic octopus doesn’t just blend into its environment, it also disguises itself as other, more threatening animals. This sounds like another incredible disguising superhero act: Mystique has very cephalopod-like abilities to change the color and texture of her skin. And unlike the afore-mentioned invisible ladies, she can create a layer that resembles clothing with this texture control. She has an additional ability to mimic voices perfectly, but I can’t explain that particular feat with my marine buddies. Mystique uses her abilities to infiltrate fortresses and impersonate powerful political or military officials and give her own orders. She can even get past a retina scanner with her eye-imitations! So how close are we to "disappearing"? Some work on artificial chromatophores came out of the University of Bristol last year and looks a little something like this: The military has already been pouring money into active camouflage projects that are trying to take this technology to a larger level. BAE systems has developed an active camouflage product called Adaptiv that uses controlled heating of discs to disguise military vehicles from anyone using infrared-detecting night vision goggles. Cornell researchers are starting from the ground up working on optical illusions at the nano-scale. Here’s a cool example of a real invisibility cloak in action! It’s not going to fool anyone walking around in it, but applying this to reduce blind spots while driving is a spectacular idea. The take home message here is that I know all of the good YouTube videos related to cephalopods, but you should still pay me money to watch octopuses if you want this technology to get anywhere. Any takers?
In just the US, it’s estimated that 2.5 million tons of electronic waste is discarded. E-waste refers to your phone, your laptop, or anything that you put batteries into that you’ve thrown out. Any kind of waste or trash buildup is a tragedy, but e-waste is a particular problem due to the materials it puts out into the ecosystem. There is the common problem of the plastic, non-biodegradable casings, but additionally circuit boards need precious metals like gold, copper, and silver to work. None of this is very friendly waste to your local woodland animals. This Science Friday podcast talks briefly about this global concern. Throwing away your phone not only puts harsh metals into the environment, but it also compounds the problem where instead of recycling those metals, we're forced to mine more from the earth. While this New York Times article only addresses gold mining, the implications are clear. The mining processes are extremely damaging to the area (they have to use cyanide to extract the gold from the rock!), and wealthier nations don’t want to have to deal with the high costs of regulating the mining safely. The demand is so high, however, that the operations are just being pushed over to less wealthy nations, where dumping of toxic leftovers into rivers and oceans goes unchecked. So what is the solution to all of this toxic waste? Recycling is the most obvious option. It’s estimated that less than 10% of phones are recycled right now, so there’s a lot of potential for improvement in this sector. In many instances, places like Best Buy will have a recycling receptacle right on the premises so you can dump your old electronics the same day you pick up a replacement! The EPA also has a website for finding locations near you to recycle e-waste. For the adventurous that want to recycle on their own, here’s a YouTube video to guide you in scavenging gold from those old cell phones! Can there be another solution? Of course! There’s never just one. We can think about engineering products that are less harmful to the environment so that we don’t have to rely on only recycling. There are already quite a few thinkers working on biodegradable plastics, which would take care of the cases for electronics. But what about the electronic parts themselves? Is there a way to get around using toxic precious metals? Maybe there's a more biologically-friendly way to design circuit boards. To start, I can think of a few superheroes who have mastered the art of organic energy generation: These characters generate the energy from their own bodies, but there are other instances of heroes being able to manipulate and conduct energy from other sources, like natural lightning: And as a quick physics lesson (a nod again to The Physics of Superheroes) Magneto can also generate an electric field if he starts running. But what can we do to start exploring bioelectrogenesis? One example closer to our world is fishes like the electric eel, and other gymnotiformes. All of these freshwater fishes are capable of producing electric fields. Most of them use it for the purpose of electrolocation to detect biological energy signals and find prey in dark, muddy waters. The electric eel is the only one of these knifefishes known to be capable of producing voltages strong enough to attack. Other animals are capable of using passive electrolocation, like sharks and bony fishes that have lateral lines, and monotremes (platypuses and echidnas) have electroreceptors in their snouts. This ability has generally only evolved in fish and amphibians because electricity is conducted better in water than it is in air, so terrestrial animals wouldn’t get much use out of electroreception. So my proposed solution is that we look at the principles these fish are using and start working on bioelectrogenesis. Maybe in the future our circuit boards can be a little more biodegradable, or even repair themselves!
There are a ton of superheroes that can fly in comic books. It’s usually people’s first response when asked what superpower they would most like to have. Flight is always a powerful ability for a hero, but the writers have to mix up the mechanisms to keep things from getting stale. This can range from rocket-powered suits like Iron Man, bursting into flames a la the Human Torch, or just mysteriously being able to float around (ex. Wonder Woman, Superman, Green Lantern, etc. ad infinitum). For this post, I’m going to focus on a few winged characters like these: This is an example of direct biomimicry where comic illustrators just mashed together human bodies and either bird, insect, or bat wings. It’s an image we’ve seen throughout history. Angels are depicted as having bird-like wings, Icarus and Daedalus from Greek mythology glued together feathers to fly away, and it’s the first idea humans tried when attempting to conquer the skies. However, human-powered ornithopters turned out to be dangerously unsuccessful, leading to many injuries and more than a few deaths of the pilots. Trying to flap like a bird doesn’t work for humans. We’re not aerodynamically designed, we don’t have the metabolism to keep it up, and we’re too heavy. Even superheroes have to overcome these disadvantages. Warren Worthington III (AKA Angel) has hollow bones, increased lung capacity, and other morphological features reminiscent of avians that allow him to achieve great heights with his feathery wings. Humanity's first forays into air travel are a great example of the different approaches of biomimetics: using structures straight from nature vs. applying core principles of the functions. A lot of nature's perfected mechanisms don't translate well into people technology. When that happens we have to look deeper and examine the functional attributes before we can try to replicate a process. Gliding was something we could master by straight up copying the parts of certain mammals. We now manufacture gliding suits designed like the tissue of sugar gliders and flying squirrels: However, there's only one direction to go while gliding, and that's down. So this advancement doesn't count as powered or sustained flight. Another X-Men member, Banshee, is capable of sustaining his flight with a glider suit, but that's because his supersonic screech can push him away from the ground and help him steer. [On a side note, this suit design is currently being adapted into a prototype for "underwater flight."] The Wright brothers were the inventors of the airplane because they were the first people, after centuries of failed flight attempts, to realize that we needed to apply the principles of birds' flight, not just the physical structures. Stabilization was one of the biggest hurdles preventing the production of a safe, heavier-than-air flight machine. After spending much time watching turkey vultures, the Wright brothers came up with a possible solution to the problem. They noticed that the vultures could twist the ends of their wings and manipulate the feathers to maintain their balance and control turns. Orville and Wilbur tested various wing-warping designs on kites and found that it brought about the desired stabilization with some tweaks.
Besides martial arts expertise and a strong sense of justice of course. Batman is all about advancing technology through his super-cool gadgetry, so it’s no surprise that he adapted a highly useful remote sensing technique from his namesake animal. Bats, along with several other species of mammals, birds, and odontocetes, use sound to navigate their surroundings and find prey. Bats produce a series of ultrasonic clicks, and then listen to the echoes to conceptualize their environment. Sound is reflected in different ways depending on the texture of the surface it bounces off of, and the echo qualities can also estimate the size of the target object. The small differences between what is heard in each ear allow the animals to pinpoint locations precisely and detect if something's moving, what direction it's moving in, and how fast. Sound like a familiar human invention? SONAR = SOund Navigation And Ranging The physical principles behind echolocation have been adapted into sonar technology used in submarines to detect other subs and whatever else is in the water. Considering that echolocation in animals was theorized more than a century before the invention of sonar, it's likely that there was a certain amount of bioinspiration involved. It was also used to sense objects in the air before radar was developed. Radar is a generally superior remote sensing system because radio waves move faster than sound waves, but sonar still remains in use underwater because the radar's emitted microwaves are rapidly absorbed by water. Passive sonar was the first system employed in underwater detection, and it worked by listening in on well-placed hydrophones. It’s called passive because the hydrophones are only receiving sounds made by other things without producing any sounds themselves. It was a subpar arrangement since it depended on a quiet ocean while you hoped that what you were looking for was noisy, which might not always be the case. World War II compelled developers to raise the level of the technology and gave us active sonar. Now subs were sending out their own *pings* (the ones you’ve surely heard in Das Boot or The Hunt for Red October) and using the echoes in a manner closer to bats. The technology is also used frequently today to map the ocean floor through multibeam swath bathymetry. Batman uses both active and passive forms of sonar in The Dark Knight when he turns every cell phone in Gotham into a microphone. The phones have become active high frequency sound generators (akin to the ultrasonic clicks of microbats), and they also passively detect sounds outside of that range. Thanks to their built in GPS, he knows exactly where every sound is coming from. Lucius Fox of Wayne Enterprises monitors the console displaying all of the sonar data to help Batman narrow in on the Joker’s location, which is accomplished by comparing a sample of the Joker's voice to all of the incoming noise. Batman takes his batty-ness a step further by projecting the sonar-created images onto the lenses built into his cowl. So even though it's pitch dark, he can use sound pictures to guide his way and find the bad guys. But even humans that aren’t billionaire crime fighters have taken advantage of this technology for personal use! Some blind people have, through direct biomimicry, learned how to use echolocation themselves. For example, this documentary from the UK series Extraordinary People features a teenager who had his eyes removed at the age of three to prevent the spread of retinal cancer. The video is long, but watching the first few minutes will give you the idea. Ben Underwood is not only capable of walking around without a cane or a guide dog, but he’s actually quite proficient at biking, rollerblading, and skateboarding! He achieves this by constantly clicking at his surroundings and listening to the way the clicks bounce back. He can’t reach the high frequencies that dolphins and bats use, but it gets the job done. Unfortunately, Ben died in 2009 as a result of his cancer. Daniel Kish is also featured in the video, and another person rendered blind by retinal cancer who has learned to use echolocation instead of a cane. He is president of World Access for the Blind and teaches children how to navigate an unfamiliar environment using sound. Cool connection to the comic book world: another blind echolocator, Juan Ruiz, appeared in the first episode of Stan Lee’s Superhumans where he demonstrated his super abilities to navigate and measure the length of a cave. It’s an excellent show for investigating the possibilities of superpowers in our mortal realm! Now, comic book fans, another superhero may be coming to mind: Daredevil was made blind by toxins that, through some comic-induced happenstance, enhanced the rest of his senses. He is often described as having a “radar-like sense,” but much of it can actually be attributed to passive sonar. His enhanced hearing allows him to identify and position objects in space. To get an idea of how powerful his ears were, he was purportedly able to hear the Hulk’s heartbeat from four blocks away. So much like these humans, he has compensated for his lack of sight by using other means to explore his environment. I don’t think any of them adapted their white canes to serve as a billy club though.
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Alanna DurkinExploring the realm of biologically inspired design one superhero example at a time, with some other natural sciences mixed in. Archives
September 2016
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