Ever since that 'biomimetic nanotechnology' term paper that my group had done one year ago, for intro to nanoworld module, i've been much more interested in Biomimetic, or Biomimicry.

According to Janine Benyus, who wrote a book titled "Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature", learning about the natural world is one thing, but learning from the natural world is a big thing. There are 10 to 30 million species in the world (out of which we only know about 4 million of them). For 3.8 billion years, all these species of organisms have undergone vigorous R&D, shaping by intense forces of natural selection. 3.8 billion years of R&D (and still going on)! And the end-products that we see today, the extant organisms have each develop their own ways of adaptations to survive, to adapt to their ever-changing environment.

Engineers, material scientists etc are slowly turning to these organisms for solutions for problems that they faced in various technologies. They realise that the solutions have been lying around them all along. The high tensile strength of silk, which is even stronger than man-made steel, the strong mother-of-pearl structure of abalone shell, my fav subject of gecko and its strong adhesive feet, to how our immune system works (which is being made use in computer engineering to design softwares)... all these are but a few examples of how we can learn from nature.

i think the most important thing that Benyus has brought up in her talk '12 sustainable design ideas from nature' is that she mentioned that these organisms have figured out a way to adapt and to pass down their genes, while taking care of the place that is going to take care of their offspring. To emulate this kind of 'sophistication', she cited this as the biggest design challenge of all. i find it very true. The way we humans solve things by ways of our technologies is very different from how the organisms solve their problems in the natural environment. Having even a greater access to resources, to quote, we can use all the chemicals in the periodic table to make something, but these organisms only used a subset of them, unquote; we seem to create even more harm to our environment in the process.