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
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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!
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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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