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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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.
This blog is being created as part of my participation in a seminar called “Biomimetics and Bioinspiration.” The assignment we were given was enticingly open-ended: Write about inspiration from nature in manufactured designs. The topics could be products already in use, or a description of a biological phenomenon that might have practical applications. With such a broad landscape of potential ideas before me, I decided the easiest way to get started would be to write what I know. I know superheroes. I have been joyfully riding the wave of the last decade’s box office obsession with crime fighters in costume. I follow up these films with my own research into the comic book background and a healthy dose of trivia. Many people wouldn’t consider this to be the most productive of hobbies, but exploring superhero lore has been enjoyable AND educational for me. The writers behind some of the best comic books and movies have made their stories appealing by diligently researching plausible science on which to base their plots. They draw inspiration from cutting-edge technology, current ethical concerns about science, and of course nature. And even when the writers don’t always get the facts exactly right, they’ve created a good starting point for real scientific discussions. My favorite example of this is Dr. James Kakalios’ 2006 book “The Physics of Superheroes.” The author subsequently served as a scientific consultant for the movie Watchmen, and interestingly enough, the text was published by Gotham Books. Dr. Kakalios examines characters from comic books and uses them to explain Newtonian and quantum physics. Sometimes the comics get it right (ex. early Superman’s strength could be explained by his biological adaptation to the planet Krypton, which had much greater gravity than Earth due to the neutron star at its core), and other times not so much (ex. later Superman shooting lasers from his eyes). In either case, the character’s traits were evaluated scientifically and extended to illustrate basic physical laws. Bioinspiration is even easier to see in comic books. It’s not hard to imagine how often the writers had to turn to nature when brainstorming a new character. All of the animal-based heroes are bioinspired, and most of them utilize skills or technology we are trying to harness in real life today. Bruce Wayne wasn’t the only human to adapt echolocation from bats to create sonar, and we are just as interested in the properties of spider silk as Peter Parker. My blog posts will look into real world problems and designs, not just fan babble about fabulous comics.
I will be posting about other biomimetic topics that you might call more “based in reality” as time goes along. Superheroes just provide me with ideas and a fun framework for exploring humanity’s mimicry of nature. |
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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