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Bio-inspiration is the new engineering: nature’s own nanotechnology. Instead of -- in crude terms -- welding large pieces of hard, “dry,” right-angled metal together, scientists, architects, and engineers are now taking a leaf from nature’s book by building intricate structures with surprising new properties, using the kind of “wet” self-assembly techniques that nature has perfected over millions of years of evolution.
The quest to match the amazing adhesion of the gecko’s foot is just one of many examples of this new science. In Peter Forbes’s engaging book we also discover how George de Mestral’s brush with the spiny fruits of the cocklebur inspired him to invent the hook-and-loop fastener usually known by its trade name Velcro; how unfolding leaves, insect wings, and space solar panels share similar origami folding patterns ; how the self-cleaning leaves of the sacred lotus plant spawned a new industry of self-cleaning surfaces; and how the photonic crystal, perhaps the most important innovation since the transistor, was actually invented by the humble sea creature Aphrodite eons ago.
The new “smart” science of bio-inspiration is going to produce a plethora of products over the next decades that will transform our lives and force us to look at the world in a completely new way. It is the science we will be reading about in tomorrow’s papers; it is the science of tomorrow’s world.
Peter Forbes has written a series of articles on bio-inspiration for The Guardian and a chapter on the same subject for The Guardian’s book Frontiers 03 (Atlantic Books). He is the editor of Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry; the translator of Primo Levi’s The Search for Roots, and the editor of Poetry Review from 1986 to 2002. He lives in London.
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