Technology that imitates nature
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4031083
Jun 9th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Biomimetics: Engineers are increasingly taking a leaf out of nature's
book when looking for solutions to design problems
AFTER taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de
Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the
burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to the
dog's fur. Under a microscope, he looked closely at the hook-and-loop
system that the seeds have evolved to hitchhike on passing animals and
aid pollination, and he realised that the same approach could be used
to join other things together. The result was Velcro: a product that
was arguably more than three billion years in the making, since that is
how long the natural mechanism that inspired it took to evolve.
Biomimetics
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/1c28084adf6a37b3
Practical Applications of Evolutionary Biology
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/ad05bd62e37d7bdc
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