June 20, 2014 • 43 mins
Humans can create some pretty astounding technologies, but it's hard to beat the R&D provided by 4 billion years of evolution. How do modern humans look to nature for inspiration in engineering and design?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, giving everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking the
podcast that looks at Patron says Oobi, Do I want
to be like you? Oh? I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm and
(00:22):
I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, everybody, I have a question for
you away. Let's say you were going to put your
life in the hands of a particular technology. Let's say
it's some kind of biomedical device that you need to
save your life, or maybe it's some kind of vehicle
that if it fails, you're going to have a lot
of trouble. But this device doesn't exist yet. You need
(00:42):
to create it, Okay, And you've got two choices. Would
you rather have one really smart scientist and one really
smart engineer with about six months to work on it
and a six figure but it, or would you rather
have millions of really really bad scientists with four and
(01:07):
a half billion years to work on it and pretty
much infinite resources. So what you're telling me is that
we're not exactly an emergency status since in theory we
have four and a half billions. I'm going with the
four and a half billion years approach, because I don't
think I'd live that long even without whatever life threatening
(01:27):
situation happens to be pointing, let's just say, what if
you've uploaded your consciousness to the matrix, and and then
four and a half billion years later, you're they're gonna
put the hard drive that your brain is stored on
on this vehicle that's gonna fly through the sky. Would
you rather have this vehicle designed by what if? Alright,
(01:48):
so the limited but talented humans or the completely brainless
but amazingly well supplied other I think, I think, I
see where you're going with this. And while many of us,
I think, credit amazing geniuses for the innovations that make
(02:09):
our lives convenient and safe and healthy, we can't ignore
the fact that many of those innovations come to us
courtesy of the fact that nature has had billions of
years to try out different designs, not consciously, I want
to make that clear, but all these different approaches have
(02:31):
come around in life, and the ones that have worked
the best have stuck around. So nature has gotten great
at perfecting certain types of approaches. So I go with
I go with the four and a half billion years
dumb approach. Yeah, you saw through my analogy, Lauren would
also I have the notes here. Yeah, I I it's
a really hard question to answer when I already know
(02:52):
the topic that we're discussing today. Okay, Well, my analogy,
of course is that the millions of dumb scientists with
nearly infinite time and resources is the process of biological evolution,
which is a decently good one. Doesn't have very good
foresight or any foresight, doesn't have very good top down
(03:12):
control or any top down control necessarily, right, but it
does have a lot of time and a lot of
resources to work things out, and it can produce some
really amazingly useful things and and some very specialized things. Yeah,
things that if we wanted to try and create something
technological that would give us an advantage in some way,
(03:35):
or make our lives better in some way, or just
achieve a certain type of task. Often it behooves us
to take a look at nature and see if there
are any examples in the natural world where this already exists,
and then say, how can we do that same thing.
That's actually something that scientists and engineers do all the time.
(03:56):
It's this field known as bio mimetics or bio mimicry,
and Jonathan recently did a video about biomemetics where he
talked about some really interesting topics that's field. To be fair,
I was copying an ant that had previously done a video,
so I was I was bio mimic ng. Really all
we ever do is copy ants, that's true, not not
(04:18):
the organism we're talking about, the actual DreamWorks motion picture ants.
I was thinking about my aunts. I mean, like, they're
real and they are living organisms, so if you were
to invent technology based on them, that would be biomemetics.
We get loop your every episode. I'm not sure what
what's causing it, but no, this is actually a really
(04:40):
awesome topic just in general, and we so awesome that
we want to cover it in a pair of podcasts.
So this one we're like looking at a very kind
of general approach to biomemetics. But we've got another one
that's much more focused on a particular organism. But for
this we thought we'd talked about lots of different examples
that you can find of cutting edge technology that is
(05:01):
taking its inspiration from stuff that's existed in some cases
for billions of years, including some of the ones that
you went into in your video, because we wanted to
sort of break those out and really explain the weird,
nitty gritty bits of of how it's working. Um. The
first topic that we wanted to cover was how moths
eyes have inspired better solar panels. Okay, now I talked
(05:25):
about in the video, but this seems counterintuitive at first.
Uh So, Lauren, why don't you kind of walk us
through what is it that's special about a moth's eyes. Well,
let's let's back it up. But before that, you know,
we've spent a lot of time on this show talking
about how solar panels are pretty inefficient, right. Um, as
they stand, the best ones in the field are really
(05:47):
only using some of the light hitting them. Um. Part
of the problem being that each of the many layers
of photovoltaic material that that make up solar panels reflects
a little bit of light, meaning that that light that's
reflecting can't be used to generate electricity, meaning that you're
wasting potential. Right. It's like it's it's reflecting out of
(06:08):
the solar panel, so you're not capturing it. Right. It's
kind of like if you wanted to heat up your
body as much as possible. You wouldn't want to wear
bright colors that reflected all of the light off or
or leave large parts of your body uncovered. That wouldn't
be very effective either because yourself in mirrors. Wow, you
are ruining my plans for the weekend. Alright. So so
(06:30):
getting to the moth size, what what's so special about those?
It turns out that they are really non reflective UM,
which is really useful to nocturnal animals, which moths are,
you know, they do their thing at night UM, And
it means that they can see in really low lighting
situations because lots of light gets through to the nerves
in their eyes that that you know, work with their
brains to sense light. It also helps in camouflage in
(06:53):
the sense that they're reflecting less light so predators can't
see them. But really we're focusing not to make too
big a pun on the fact that it's redirecting light
into the eye itself. And they have two structures in
their eyes that help them out with this. At first,
they have a tapital mirror, which is a lens at
the back of their eyes that that bounces light back
through the eyeball for a second chance at hitting all
(07:14):
of those sensor nerves. Um. It's also why like like
shark eys and cat eyes seemed to glow in the dark.
Also alligator eyes. Yeah yeah, A lot lots of animals
have this thing, um. And they've also got a special
structure called and okay, this is for reals the technical term,
you guys, a corneal nipple array. We can't say that
on this podcast. This is science and it's it's this
(07:39):
nanoscopic landscape of cone shaped structures, each only some like
two D three hundred nanimators tall and wide. Wow. And
remember a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. These
are tiny, tiny structures. Yeah yeah, And and these we
little things allow light to just kind of slip by
that the shape doesn't reflect light the way that a
flat surface would. Researchers started taking note of this all
(08:01):
the way back in the nineteen seventies. Wow, all right, okay,
so we see these little structures. We see that they
are allowing light to slip through and not reflect off.
But that doesn't necessarily mean there's a practical application right away.
But someone managed to find one, right Yeah, researchers and
you talked about them a little bit in detail. In
the video at the North Carolina State University recreated the
(08:24):
nanostructure and and started putting it into photovoltaic materials. So
the exact amount of light that's regained by the structures
in photovoltaics is unconfirmed at the moment, but but it's
really cool that scientists are working on it. Right, So
this is a promising technology. We do not yet know
if it's efficacy is such that it's going to be
(08:47):
a good return on investment. It may turn out that
the expense of engineering this doesn't really justify whatever whatever
increase and efficiency we might see, or it may turn
out that it ends up boosting a should see enough
where this becomes the norm. Yeah. Uh. One of those
early problems that we've run into is that, um, the
(09:08):
nano structures get really easily clogged with dirt. I mean,
they're they're little pokey things, and so dirt can just
kind of sidle up in there and get stuck. But
but some researchers at the University of Cambridge are working
on creating self cleaning materials that have this desired nanostructure,
which involves like photo catalytic nanoparticles of titanium dioxide that
break dirt down into just carbon dioxide and water. Of course,
(09:32):
I mean that's what I would have done. Well, the
cool thing here is I mean, since they get clogged
with dirt, that would obviously mean that you are making
the solar panel more sort of well the yeah, the
level in front of the photovoltakes gets opaque and so
no light is getting through. So yeah, obviously this is
a very important part. Uh, yeah, it's pretty cool. We've
talked about self cleaning materials a couple of times too,
(09:54):
so I'm glad that we were able to to incorporate
that in this discussion. Clearly I wasn't able to go
into kind of detail in the video, so it's really
neat to be able to get a chance to express
it here. So one of those other topics that you
talked about in the video was the centripetal spiral and
nautilus shells and how they can be useful in in
(10:14):
in fluid dynamics and okay, so so the gig with
this guy's uh you know, turbines, which are just rotating
devices that include a rod with blades attached to either
move a fluid or to have a fluid move through
the machine, thus generating work. UM. Turbines have existed for
a few thousand years in the form of water wheels
(10:34):
and wind meal wind meals, meals, windmills, yes, um and
the and there have been a lot of modern advancements
to these from the materials used to make them too
very precise fluid dynamic driven physical tweaks UM. But they're
still not perfect despite the best of our science, because
they involve necessary resistance due to drag, a lot of noise,
(10:57):
and continual where to their compos eonens. And this is
important research because although the turbines that we have today
work pretty well, we've got a lot of things that
would benefit from moving more smoothly through fluid, like you
know cars or airplanes. Yeah, atmosphere is a fluid, So
having that sort of smooth movement through a fluid. Studying
(11:19):
fluid dynamics, I mean, this is a complex field that
concerns a lot of different sciences and also engineers. Yeah,
and if you have a more efficiently moving car, then
you have to then you don't have to use as
much fuel. Yeah, there are multiple benefits that spill out
by this kind of study. One J Harmon, who's the
CEO of an industrial fluid dynamics design company called pack Scientific,
(11:43):
has patented a few designs based not on the age
old turbine design, but rather on the golden spiral a
k A logarithmic curve with a growth factor of Fi,
or a Fibonacci spiral or the shape of a nautilus shell. Huh. Yeah,
As it turns out, um, you can look around in
(12:04):
nature and that that shape pops up in more than
just knowledge shells right everywhere. Basically, Um, it's this really efficient,
like sturdy, space saving shape. Lots of roses have petals
arranged in this spiral. Sunflower seeds grow in the same pattern.
Pine cones and pineapples have their spines arranged and like
double five spirals, both clockwise and counterclockwise. Um, the human
(12:28):
inner ear is a golden spiral. Whirlpools are this golden spiral. Yeah.
So when you see the shape appear over and over again,
you're probably in the movie Uzumaki and you should watch out.
Or so that's really that's kind of a nonsensical Japanese
horror film. I don't I don't necessarily recommend it. The
the interesting thing I find about the shape about seeing
(12:50):
it over and over again, is that this is a
suggestion that this particular shape has worked well for its
numerous applications depending upon what it is you're looking at
the fact that you're seeing it and not a bunch
of different types of spirals. If you see one type
of spiral happening repeatedly, that might be an indication that
something's going on there that that merits further study, that
(13:12):
perhaps there are ways of taking advantage of said shape. Yeah.
Harmon maintains that creating things that either move fluid or
or move through a fluid in this shape will make
them just hella efficient, you know. Really, that's that that
is the technical science term that that it will reduce
drag to to not very much drag at all. Um.
(13:35):
He claims that it's the shape of like least resistance
conserving the most possible energy. And the idea here is
that the shape enacts a centripetal force on the fluid.
And I'm not a fluid dynamics expert, but I'm going
to attempt to explain how how this goes. So, Okay, so,
letting fluid flow through this spiral shape means that the
(13:58):
fluid molecules along the edges of the surface will experience drag,
but creating what's known as a boundary layer of slow
moving fluid at the edges of the shape, which lets
the rest of the fluid flow through the center of
the shape faster, thus creating a vortex that kind of
(14:19):
pulls the fluid through the shape. Good Lord, the fact
that you have fluid through and flow so many times
in that explanation and you managed to get through it,
it blows my mind. I was speaking like five times
as slow as flow flings fluids down by the flow. Shoot, yeah,
it's but no, that's really cool. And and you know
(14:39):
it's again. This is one of those things that you
would have to test repeatedly to see if the effects
are in fact measurable. But but it is one of
those things that on a on a on a given
level seems to make real sense. So the spiral is fascinating.
But there are also other examples of biomimicry, including the
amazing geck I tak about this in the video, and
(15:01):
I talked about how I love geckos. That is totally true.
I love I think they're the cutest things. And I've
been fortunate enough to visit Hawaii a few times. Hawaii
often if you are staying in a home in Hawaii,
which is normally where I stay, I've got a friend
who lives there. Um, all those homes are kind of
(15:22):
a gecko palaces, And so you'll wake up and you'll
just see geckos on your wall and on your ceiling,
and occasionally you need to shake out your clothes just
to make sure that you're not gonna have a gecko
surprise when you put them on. Did they No? They
they can? They could, I mean they could, they could
really nip. I mean they're they're they're they're not. Their
(15:42):
jaws are pretty small, and they tend to they are
very timid critters. They run away, they don't. They are
not the kind that want to come up to you. Yeah,
but as you talked about in the video, and as
I think we've alluded to briefly on this podcast before,
geckos have some amazing feat. Yes, they are able to
crawl up vertical surfaces. They're able to crawl across ceilings.
(16:05):
They're able to hang by a single toe from a
pane of glass. Yeah, So if you wanted to recreate
this in the lab. How would you go about doing that? Well,
you could think, maybe, oh, maybe I need to put
some kind of really sticky material like glue on my hands,
or maybe suction cups like giants suction cups. That's got
to be how they do it really well? In these
(16:29):
types of things aren't really very feasible, especially in the
long term. If you've got some kind of sticky residue
like a glue um that's not going to stick to
some types of surfaces. They're multiple problems. Why are you
going to stick to everything? To It's not necessarily going
to be easy for you to remove your hand and
then move it to the next space. And three, it
will eventually wear off if you don't have some way
(16:51):
of secreting said sticky substance. So how do they do it? Well,
they don't do it. There was sticky substance. Do they
do it? They do it through hair their nanotechnology. Yes,
they do actually, uh so. Researchers studying geckos found out
that they have nano scale beta caratin elastic hairs on
their feet and toes. And let me let me break
(17:13):
that down for you, just in case you that that
doesn't really mean a whole lot to you in the
particular configuration of words. Um, they're they're very strong, very
thin protein structures. Beta carratins are what make up like reptiles,
scales and claws and shells uh and also birds, feathers,
beaks and claws. They've got about the same toughness of
(17:34):
kitan which makes up sea bug shells, lobsters and crabs
and all that kind of stuff. Um. But they can
be really stretching in bendy, especially at the nano scale,
in which, as we have spoken about before, everything is
super wicky. Yeah. Yeah, things on the nano scale have
they behave in different ways than stuff that we're used
to on the macro scale. So when you get down
(17:56):
to the nano scale, you're actually getting small enough where
quantum effects are to take place to which is kind
of cool. Yeah. So but wait a second. I can
stick my head, which is covered in hair if you
can't see it right now, against a wall, and that
does not help me stick to the wall. So how
are these little hair like fibers Helmell. First of all,
the human hair is, you know, some hundred thousand nanometers thick,
(18:19):
so it's not nearly on the same scale. All right,
These we little hairs are so we that they interact
on a molecular level with the stuff that that walls
or glass or whatever are made of. Um, what's called
the Vanderwalls force kicks in and and whayam, the critter
can climb right up. Something. I love Oasis song about that,
(18:41):
You're my vonder Walls. What's just me? Well, all joking aside,
or at least most of it aside Vanderwall's force. This
is something that can be either an attractive force or
a repulsive force. It's not necessarily one or the It's
it's not just attraction. But this is something we talked
about on a molecular level with surfaces and their their
(19:05):
tendency to either add here or repulse. So a few
different research teams have been working on replicating this in materials.
There's a team, particularly from the Zoological Institute at the
University of Keel, that created a silicone tape that's patterned
with tiny hairs, no glue, no residue, works underwater. It
(19:25):
can be peeled off and restuck to things thousands of
times without losing its gripping power. See, I want to
have one of those toys that you used to have
where you could throw it against the wall very slowly
crawled down using this kind of approach, and you could
just throw it against the or the wall or a
window or anything and it just splats and stays there.
That would be I would have fun with that. That
(19:45):
would be minutes of a good fun. Okay, you for
you long minutes a good fun. However, I'm a simple
humanating and could easily stretch that into a full afternoon
of activities. So oh and part part of the thing
here is that these hairs aren't the only things that
that get goes have going for them in terms of
(20:06):
sticking capacity. Um, they're they're well climbing ability also involves
the curved shape of their toes um and the way
that their feet and toes spread out when they make
contact with the surface, and their toes self cleaning abilities.
Self cleaning. Now, this is kind of going back to
what we had to you know, the discussion about the
(20:28):
little projections and the moth I projections that when we
made the synthetic versions, we had to come up with
some sort of self cleaning process in order to make
the solar panels and I get all clogged up and opaque.
So what's going on here? Well, our our friendly neighborhood,
creepy Crawley researchers at the University of Akron, and I
do want to mention you. You've pronounced it in the
video Akron and that has to be fair. He was
(20:51):
talking about the planet. To be fair, that only happened
in one take, and Dan chose that take. I was,
I was, I was born in Makron, so I have
so I just I needed to point it. I understand.
I have Ohio State pride. I watched that video recently,
as in just before we went into this podcast, and
I winced when I realized that was the take he
(21:12):
went with. At any rate, Um, we we've we've mentioned
these researchers a couple of times recently, I think, and
they published some research about Getto's footprints that has helped
helped us kind of solve this puzzle a little bit further.
It turns out the getto footprints contain residue of these
thin oils called phosphilipids UM, which we're pretty sure gettos
(21:36):
excrete to keep all those little nano hairs clean UM.
And it might also help them quickly adhere to and
release from surfaces, right, So that that would make sense.
You would want to keep the hairs clear of any
debris because otherwise it would it would inhibit your exactly,
you wouldn't be able to adhere to the wall anymore.
And also, yeah, the oil making it easier to h
(21:58):
to release and then put your foot down and then
release again in order to continue motion. Uh. Again, it
makes sense. Obviously, these are things that are under continuing study.
So it's uh, it seems to be a solid hypothesis.
We'll see if it after we're able to study it further,
if it holds true. Yeah, and once once we get
(22:20):
that figured out, it might help some of these other
physical process uh researchers to to perfect the designs that
they're making. Like like, in addition to that silicone tape,
some other researchers are working with carbon nanotubes to reproduce
the physical structures of these little hairs. Man, carbon nanotubes,
why can't they do? They are magic? They are They're
(22:43):
not really, but they seem like it. No real magic,
thanks Joe. They're made by wizards. Um. The most success
that these researchers have seen so far has been with
a vertically aligned, single walled carbon nanotubes in case you
were curious, and I know you were um which could
could hypothetically have a greater maximum sticking power than the
(23:05):
original gecko feed themselves. That's pretty awesome. I have heard
of uh people determined to make kind of a wall
climbing suit using essentially this approach, using carbon nanotubes as
the gripping power for that kind of suit. So essentially,
this is a a different sort of spiky suit. We've
talked about other ones, like we talked about the spiky
(23:26):
suit that gives you an alert if there's an oncoming object,
but this, in this case, it would it would be
a totally different type of spicy suit that would allow
you to climb walls. I guess you could incorporate both
so that you could finally get a Spider Man outfit going. Well,
you still wouldn't have the webs, no, but stay tuned
for digging fans, because we might actually address some of
that in a future podcast, you know. But there are
(23:47):
a lot of other ways that bio mimicry can come
into the way we create new pieces of technology, and
especially in robotic that's a huge one, and we've talked
about that in the past two Yeah. One thing I'd
like to say about robotics is that you can look
to bio mimicry or biomemetics, not just to inspire the
(24:08):
physical designs, like okay, so we can make something like
get feed the materials right now, not just the materials,
not just the static designs, but you can use bio
memetics to program behavior. Uh. And what I had in
mind was the Boston Dynamics robots that we've talked about,
right Oh yeah, yeah, like like Big Dog, yeah, Big
Dog or the wild Cat. You know these uh, these
(24:31):
running four legged robots, or they also have bipedal robots
walking two legged robots. It's interesting that when you look
at robots, most of them, if they're going to be
moving around, they have tracks or they have wheels. Yeah.
Legs are tough. Yeah that makes sense. Wheels are very
energy efficient, they're you know, they're great, they're easy to program,
(24:55):
but but they're not good for everything. Right. We have
legs for a reason. We can do all kinds of
stuff that most robots can't do. We can climb trees,
we can scrabble over weird shaped rocks, we can we
can use them to help propel us for swimming a
lot of different There is very very versatile in the
way that wheels are not not at all. And so
it's not just the fact that we're making robots that
(25:17):
have legs that's bio mimetic, but it's also the way
that we programmed legs. I mean, when you think about this,
say you're you're programming a robot to move around, Well,
if it just has wheels, that's pretty simple. You can say,
roll this way to go forward, roll this way to
go back, you know, turn with this differential and in
the different wheels to go one way or the other.
But if you've got legs, yeah, depending upon how many
(25:41):
means you have to take into account the freedom of movement,
how many how many points of freedom of movement do
those legs have. What is the weight of the robot,
what's the momentum the robot's going to be experiencing balance
the weight on each of the four legs as they're
moving right or however many legs, because if you have
four legs is on a robot, I mean, it's not
(26:02):
obvious at what time each leg should move right. Yeah,
So there's a lot of biomimicry that goes on in
the robotics field, a lot of study of how animals
move and then attempting to engineer that so that a
robot can take advantage of this particular approach. I mean,
we've seen it in nature, how animals are able to
maneuver a depthly through an environment, And if we're able
(26:25):
to copy that, then that's a lot easier than just
trying to innovate, you know, from from nothing. Yeah. One
of my favorite biommedic designs that I've seen in robot
locomotion is something we've talked about on this podcast before.
It's the way the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot stumbles. Yeah,
if he stumbles to catch itself when it's been knocked
off balance. Right, if it if it were to step,
(26:46):
say on an unsteady rock and the rock gave way,
it would be able to stumble and catch itself or
to shift its weight around. Yeah, and in a way
that looks really unnerving lee realistic. Right. Or or or
if someone who perhaps ops when you're watching a video
appears to be an uncarrying sociopath kicks the dog, it
can catch itself. I realized, I'm that this human being
(27:09):
is probably someone who has a rich emotional life and
never never kick a real animal. But it's just that
it's probably never kicked the robot unless for strict testing purpose.
It's it's it was just one of those reactions where
you immediately think you are a bad person. They're not
a bad person. It's just that's the reaction I had
(27:29):
immediately upon watching the video of someone kicking this dog,
which not dog, but this robot, which then would catch itself. Um.
I had another one which I had to expel to include,
which was the Veloci roach. I've read about this one.
This was one of those robots that as soon as
you read about you think science there's some things you
can do and some things you should do, and those
(27:51):
two things do not always coincide. Why have you created
a robotic cockroach? It's the classic Ean Malcolm question. Your
scientists so concerned with whether or not they could, they
didn't stop to think if they should. Man and Malcolm, Yeah,
there's gonna be a point where we're just going to
do an entire podcast doing our own impressions of various celebrities,
(28:14):
and we get scientists and obviously Nick Cage is going
to be one of the three. I mean, that's going
to have to happen. You guys have already been treated
to Knowles excellent Nicholas Cage, right, Uh not, go back
and listen to our podcast about bees. I'm gonna go
ahead and call Jay Moore doing an impression of Christopher
(28:35):
walking because my impression of Christopher walking is so bad
I have to remove it, at least by one impressionist
at any rate. So the Veloci Roach Getting Back on
Track is a robot that that mimics the movement and
uh and and body size of a cockroach. They took
the cockroach as sort of the the inspiration for the
design of the robot and for its size, it's one
(28:58):
of the fastest robots for its size. You know, you
have to take the scale into consideration. Also, you can
just see it in lots of different other examples in robotics.
Is These are just a couple of the ones that
we thought would be fun to talk about, but it's
throughout the entire industry Beyond that, we're looking at biomimicry
(29:19):
for things not just technology related, but sort of on
a a civil engineering and social engineering level. Social insects
have become an area of study for that reason, because
social insects, if you were to look at an individual
insect that has uh, this kind of social structure, so
something like an ant or a b Now that particular
(29:42):
uh example, that particular individual insect, its behaviors are pretty simple. Yeah,
it's not really what we would call smart. Yeah, it's
not at all smart. It's it's pretty dumb in the
big in the big, grand scheme of things. However, the
collection of these insects can behave in very comple x
and seemingly intelligent ways and respond to dynamic changes in
(30:05):
its environment and a very impressive approach, And that kind
of thing fascinates scientists and engineers and could potentially let
us answer some questions that could end up benefiting humans
down the line. I would argue that that bees are
probably more smart than ants, but maybe only because I
know bees better. Maybe maybe we should do a future
(30:26):
of ants podcast. Yeah yeah, I don't know if you've
noticed we do insect podcasts. Yeah, yeah, well that's fair.
Just don't just don't do the same with the racknets. Okay,
make that promise for me. We promised you Okay, good.
It's an easy promise to make because we already did
that one. But anyway, so let's talk about beatles beets
(30:52):
Let's do talk about beatles, not not not the people
say we beatle around. Wow. So you took a band
that itself was a essentially a weak copy of another band.
But they're a biommedic man, do you know what that's fair?
I am going to allow it? Um all right, No,
(31:13):
I'm talking about beetles and irrigation, not irrigating your beetle.
So b E t l E. That's correct, not beatle,
but beetle. So in this case, I'm talking about an
engineer who looked at the numb beetle and was inspired
to create a way of extracting water from the air.
See this particular beetle, it tends to live in very
(31:35):
arid conditions. And one of the things that will it
does is that it will come out onto the surface
of whatever its environment is in the early morning, uh,
and will allow it allows water to collect on its shell,
it condenses upon its shell, and then it uses that
water to help survive. So the this engineer looked at
(31:57):
that and said, huh, is there something I could do
that to mimic this sort of behavior, and he came
up with a system that had a self powered pump
and a series of tubes, not unlike the internet. No wait,
I'm sorry, that's not really a series of tubes. Now,
there really was a series of tubes underground that pumped
cool air to this UH to this above ground portion
(32:20):
of the of the device. Yeah, it's called the air drop.
So the above ground portion of the air drop gets
cooled by this air that's flowing through these underground pipes,
and that that cooling means that water will condense on
the air drop and then flow down into collection area.
And specifically, this would be used to collect water to
UH to then give over to a garden um. It's
(32:43):
not a lot of water. You would not imagine it
to be a lot of water. This is for arid
locations where you're pulling tiny amounts of moisture of the air,
but it can be enough to grow certain types of plants.
So it's a really interesting approach and it also a
one It won an award. I think he got some
thing like dollars to continue to develop the idea. And
(33:05):
there are a lot of countries that are particularly interested
in looking at this approach, seeing if it's scalable, seeing
if it's if it's a practical approach. So it's really
interesting as well. Yeah, definitely. One of the other things
that we wanted to talk about was a suggestion from
um from from one of our YouTube viewers on the
video that you Jonathan did about BioMedics um and this
(33:28):
was user Magic of Dark. So, so thank you sir
or madam for for writing in so Magic of Dark.
Here here is the the scenario I'm going to paint
for you. I'm not gonna say immediately what it was
you requested, it will become a parent. But way back
in George Demistral went for a walk. Now this guy
is a Swiss engineer, all right, He's going out there,
(33:50):
he's walking. He's looking for new and exciting ways to
make hot chocolate. Yeah, you know, the way Swiss engineers do.
And eventually gets back after the end of his walk
and starts to do what any self respecting walking natural
naturalist slash engineer would do, which is starting to pick
the burrs that have accumulated on clothing and his dog
(34:11):
out of the various fabrics and hairs. If you have
a longer haired dog. Picking burrs off the dog is
a sad and very labor intensive processes. It's much easier
just to take scissors to the dog. What the dog
doesn't know? My dog. My dog is a hairy dog
and he gets birds all in his face. I have
(34:35):
had to deal with this. But my dog tends to
get them stuck in his paws. So it's also, yeah,
there's there's just but no, this is not sad story, guys.
This is a story about how the Swiss engineer looked
at these birds and how they had hooked into his
clothing and said, wait, is there a way that I
could engineer a fabric that could do the same thing
and act as a fastener, Because here I'm seeing a
(34:58):
natural substance the doing this. Could we do this? So
that's on purpose? And so he created a pair of
fabrics that complimented one another. One of those fabrics had
lots of tiny hooks in it. The other fabric had
lots of tiny hoops in it, so that the hooks
and the hoops would interlock when you put them together,
and if you pulled them apart, they could snap loose.
(35:19):
And thus velcrow was born. Now Velcrow is named after
a combination of the words velvet and crochet. If you crochet,
you use a little hook, so he wouldn't patent it
until nineteen fifty five. Of course, back in nineteen forty one,
there was a little thing called World War two that
was going on, so that was getting people really busy,
(35:41):
and the original velcrow was made from cotton. Now eventually
Mistral would switch over to nylon because cotton would wear
out after you used it for a while and nylon
was a little more resilient and end up getting an
enormous pr boost during the nineteen sixties because that's when
the space race was in full effect. And one of
the problems that NASA had was, hey, you know, if
(36:03):
we go out to space, we're in free fall. So
we're in this environment where there's weightlessness or or very
you know, micro gravity is in in in play. So
how do we keep the stuff what we bring someplace
where it's not going to get in the way. And
they came up with, hey, why don't we use this
velcrow stuff. It's it's easier than tying, especially if you're
wearing a space suit. You know, you don't have the
(36:24):
manual dexterity to necessarily tie something to something else, and
it ended up being kind of a miracle uh technology
for use during the Space Race. It was not invented
specifically for that. That often ends up being one of
those facts you'll hear things like, you know, ten technologies
NASA invented. It was invented before the Space Race, but
(36:46):
it was incredibly useful during the Space Race, and as
a result of that ended up becoming well known, so
much so that the term Velcrow is now used for
any sort of materials where it has this hook and
and loop system. Not not all of those are technically
from the company Velcrow. It's proprietary, right, But it's sort
(37:07):
of like Frisbee or rock or clean necks or band aids.
You know, the sort of thing where one example, the
primary example, becomes the name for all of the product.
It's sort of some jello same sort of thing. So anyway,
that's the story. It's pretty cool. It was a big success,
and of course we all know now that it went
on to forever replace all shoelaces. I did have Velcrow
(37:30):
sneakers early nineties. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also had hypercolor
T shirts, but that's not biomimicry. That's just awesome. I
I think that in fashion all buttons, laces, and buckles
of all kinds should be replaced by I really dislike
velcro in my clothing. I hate the noise. I can't
stand the noise. I also think all pants should have
(37:52):
elastic ankles. I don't like you anymore. I have so
many jokes, but none of them are appropriate, So I'm
going to move on. Uh. Well, the last thing I
was really gonna look at, and by look at, I
mean just talk about, because he can't really look at it,
is nanotechnology. Again, we have a really good microscope. Yeah,
and even then, if you're out talking about optical microscope,
(38:14):
you can't really look at it because if you're at
a small enough scale, you're actually so small that light
itself is not going to pick you up. So um So, anyway,
nanotechnology has become a growing industry in in the world
of science and tech, and a lot of that is
all about biomimicry, because, as it turns out, building stuff
(38:35):
on the nano scale is really hard. Like I mentioned,
we have quantum effects that can come into play there,
and and it is difficult even for us to be
able to see, let alone manipulate things down at that scale. Well,
when we've talked about molecular assemblers on this show before,
you know, that's this idea that that you'd have this
kind of almost magic machine that could on the nanoscale
(38:57):
build tiny, tiny little components and you know, make food
or make pieces for your starship. It would just build
everything molecule by molecule. Well, if that's ever possible in
real life, it seems like it's a long way away.
I mean, that's just it's so hard to imagine making
something like that. But your body has stuff in it
(39:19):
right now pretty much does that. You are doing that
as we speak. Yeah, the ribosomes in your cells are
basically molecular simblers. They're assembling molecules piece at a time.
And then you have things like viruses, which one of
those one of those things that's really difficult to classify.
(39:39):
I mean, you still have those those classic arguments of
does a virus count as life or not? Because it
exhibits many of the traits of life, but not necessarily
all of them, and it is an incredibly simple structure.
But the simple structure, which is essentially you got a
protein shell and then you've got the virus that's inside
(40:00):
the shell, and the protein shell will doc with certain
types of cells, which then allows the virus to invade
the cell and essentially take over the cells production facilities
to make more viruses which they can spread out and
do the same to other cells. Well, there could be
some actual practical uses of this in our world that
(40:20):
are not involved with making someone sick. It could be
making someone better. And the idea is to use something
like a virus shell that would have the right proteins
on it to dock with certain types of cells, specifically
cancer cells, and then you scoop out whatever the viral
material would have been inside this virus shell, and inside
(40:40):
you put chemotherapy drugs, so you can deliver chemotherapy drugs
to specific cells as opposed to a region, and in theory,
you would be able to deliver an effective medicine while
limiting the side effects as much as is possible. Right,
because one of the problems with a wide spread chemotherapy
is that it's going to make you very sick because
(41:01):
because it's getting into your your the poisons are are
getting into your other tissues, and that's bad times for you. Yeah,
it's it's if you can target specifically the cancer cells,
then yeah, you really minimize that that area effect that
you get otherwise. So it's a really promising area of research.
It's obviously incredibly complex, it's not you know, the idea
(41:23):
is simple, the execution is much more difficult. But it's
something that a lot of people are looking into. And
I got a chance a few years ago to interview
a nanotechnology expert at Emory, and he was talking about
how using viruses was one of the most promising approaches
because why invent something that needs to do a specific
(41:45):
task if there's already an example of it on nature,
which is exactly what we've been talking about this whole podcast.
So again, it's it's that the nanotechnology world is relatively
new to us and strange and unusual, but in nature,
this has been part of the way things work for
billions of years. So we should look to examples because
(42:06):
that will be at least a first step into that world,
and you know, we'll probably create new approaches that are
built on those first steps, that go beyond what nature does.
But it's a good starting point. So yeah, pretty cool stuff,
and they're probably thousands of other examples of biomimicry that
(42:26):
we could talk about tens of thous yeah, so millions
of All right, well, let's not go overboard. So but
if there, if we happen to have accidentally skipped over
one that you, dear listener hold as the most important
example of biomimicry, and you think, why didn't you talk
about this? Let us know, because we'd love to be
(42:48):
able to cover that perhaps in the future episode um
little word, though, if it's about spiders, you can hold off,
hold back that that message. And then if we didn't
talk about spiders the way you wanted us to, then
you can let us know. But really, if there are
other examples that you think, no, this is super cool
and people need to know about it, let us know.
(43:09):
And the best way to get into contact with us
is through Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus, all three places.
You can find us with the handle FW thinking and
we will talk to you again really soon. For more
on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward
thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go
(43:42):
places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, giving everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking the
podcast that looks at Patron says Oobi, Do I want
to be like you? Oh? I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm and
(00:22):
I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, everybody, I have a question for
you away. Let's say you were going to put your
life in the hands of a particular technology. Let's say
it's some kind of biomedical device that you need to
save your life, or maybe it's some kind of vehicle
that if it fails, you're going to have a lot
of trouble. But this device doesn't exist yet. You need
(00:42):
to create it, Okay, And you've got two choices. Would
you rather have one really smart scientist and one really
smart engineer with about six months to work on it
and a six figure but it, or would you rather
have millions of really really bad scientists with four and
(01:07):
a half billion years to work on it and pretty
much infinite resources. So what you're telling me is that
we're not exactly an emergency status since in theory we
have four and a half billions. I'm going with the
four and a half billion years approach, because I don't
think I'd live that long even without whatever life threatening
(01:27):
situation happens to be pointing, let's just say, what if
you've uploaded your consciousness to the matrix, and and then
four and a half billion years later, you're they're gonna
put the hard drive that your brain is stored on
on this vehicle that's gonna fly through the sky. Would
you rather have this vehicle designed by what if? Alright,
(01:48):
so the limited but talented humans or the completely brainless
but amazingly well supplied other I think, I think, I
see where you're going with this. And while many of us,
I think, credit amazing geniuses for the innovations that make
(02:09):
our lives convenient and safe and healthy, we can't ignore
the fact that many of those innovations come to us
courtesy of the fact that nature has had billions of
years to try out different designs, not consciously, I want
to make that clear, but all these different approaches have
(02:31):
come around in life, and the ones that have worked
the best have stuck around. So nature has gotten great
at perfecting certain types of approaches. So I go with
I go with the four and a half billion years
dumb approach. Yeah, you saw through my analogy, Lauren would
also I have the notes here. Yeah, I I it's
a really hard question to answer when I already know
(02:52):
the topic that we're discussing today. Okay, Well, my analogy,
of course is that the millions of dumb scientists with
nearly infinite time and resources is the process of biological evolution,
which is a decently good one. Doesn't have very good
foresight or any foresight, doesn't have very good top down
(03:12):
control or any top down control necessarily, right, but it
does have a lot of time and a lot of
resources to work things out, and it can produce some
really amazingly useful things and and some very specialized things. Yeah,
things that if we wanted to try and create something
technological that would give us an advantage in some way,
(03:35):
or make our lives better in some way, or just
achieve a certain type of task. Often it behooves us
to take a look at nature and see if there
are any examples in the natural world where this already exists,
and then say, how can we do that same thing.
That's actually something that scientists and engineers do all the time.
(03:56):
It's this field known as bio mimetics or bio mimicry,
and Jonathan recently did a video about biomemetics where he
talked about some really interesting topics that's field. To be fair,
I was copying an ant that had previously done a video,
so I was I was bio mimic ng. Really all
we ever do is copy ants, that's true, not not
(04:18):
the organism we're talking about, the actual DreamWorks motion picture ants.
I was thinking about my aunts. I mean, like, they're
real and they are living organisms, so if you were
to invent technology based on them, that would be biomemetics.
We get loop your every episode. I'm not sure what
what's causing it, but no, this is actually a really
(04:40):
awesome topic just in general, and we so awesome that
we want to cover it in a pair of podcasts.
So this one we're like looking at a very kind
of general approach to biomemetics. But we've got another one
that's much more focused on a particular organism. But for
this we thought we'd talked about lots of different examples
that you can find of cutting edge technology that is
(05:01):
taking its inspiration from stuff that's existed in some cases
for billions of years, including some of the ones that
you went into in your video, because we wanted to
sort of break those out and really explain the weird,
nitty gritty bits of of how it's working. Um. The
first topic that we wanted to cover was how moths
eyes have inspired better solar panels. Okay, now I talked
(05:25):
about in the video, but this seems counterintuitive at first.
Uh So, Lauren, why don't you kind of walk us
through what is it that's special about a moth's eyes. Well,
let's let's back it up. But before that, you know,
we've spent a lot of time on this show talking
about how solar panels are pretty inefficient, right. Um, as
they stand, the best ones in the field are really
(05:47):
only using some of the light hitting them. Um. Part
of the problem being that each of the many layers
of photovoltaic material that that make up solar panels reflects
a little bit of light, meaning that that light that's
reflecting can't be used to generate electricity, meaning that you're
wasting potential. Right. It's like it's it's reflecting out of
(06:08):
the solar panel, so you're not capturing it. Right. It's
kind of like if you wanted to heat up your
body as much as possible. You wouldn't want to wear
bright colors that reflected all of the light off or
or leave large parts of your body uncovered. That wouldn't
be very effective either because yourself in mirrors. Wow, you
are ruining my plans for the weekend. Alright. So so
(06:30):
getting to the moth size, what what's so special about those?
It turns out that they are really non reflective UM,
which is really useful to nocturnal animals, which moths are,
you know, they do their thing at night UM, And
it means that they can see in really low lighting
situations because lots of light gets through to the nerves
in their eyes that that you know, work with their
brains to sense light. It also helps in camouflage in
(06:53):
the sense that they're reflecting less light so predators can't
see them. But really we're focusing not to make too
big a pun on the fact that it's redirecting light
into the eye itself. And they have two structures in
their eyes that help them out with this. At first,
they have a tapital mirror, which is a lens at
the back of their eyes that that bounces light back
through the eyeball for a second chance at hitting all
(07:14):
of those sensor nerves. Um. It's also why like like
shark eys and cat eyes seemed to glow in the dark.
Also alligator eyes. Yeah yeah, A lot lots of animals
have this thing, um. And they've also got a special
structure called and okay, this is for reals the technical term,
you guys, a corneal nipple array. We can't say that
on this podcast. This is science and it's it's this
(07:39):
nanoscopic landscape of cone shaped structures, each only some like
two D three hundred nanimators tall and wide. Wow. And
remember a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. These
are tiny, tiny structures. Yeah yeah, And and these we
little things allow light to just kind of slip by
that the shape doesn't reflect light the way that a
flat surface would. Researchers started taking note of this all
(08:01):
the way back in the nineteen seventies. Wow, all right, okay,
so we see these little structures. We see that they
are allowing light to slip through and not reflect off.
But that doesn't necessarily mean there's a practical application right away.
But someone managed to find one, right Yeah, researchers and
you talked about them a little bit in detail. In
the video at the North Carolina State University recreated the
(08:24):
nanostructure and and started putting it into photovoltaic materials. So
the exact amount of light that's regained by the structures
in photovoltaics is unconfirmed at the moment, but but it's
really cool that scientists are working on it. Right, So
this is a promising technology. We do not yet know
if it's efficacy is such that it's going to be
(08:47):
a good return on investment. It may turn out that
the expense of engineering this doesn't really justify whatever whatever
increase and efficiency we might see, or it may turn
out that it ends up boosting a should see enough
where this becomes the norm. Yeah. Uh. One of those
early problems that we've run into is that, um, the
(09:08):
nano structures get really easily clogged with dirt. I mean,
they're they're little pokey things, and so dirt can just
kind of sidle up in there and get stuck. But
but some researchers at the University of Cambridge are working
on creating self cleaning materials that have this desired nanostructure,
which involves like photo catalytic nanoparticles of titanium dioxide that
break dirt down into just carbon dioxide and water. Of course,
(09:32):
I mean that's what I would have done. Well, the
cool thing here is I mean, since they get clogged
with dirt, that would obviously mean that you are making
the solar panel more sort of well the yeah, the
level in front of the photovoltakes gets opaque and so
no light is getting through. So yeah, obviously this is
a very important part. Uh, yeah, it's pretty cool. We've
talked about self cleaning materials a couple of times too,
(09:54):
so I'm glad that we were able to to incorporate
that in this discussion. Clearly I wasn't able to go
into kind of detail in the video, so it's really
neat to be able to get a chance to express
it here. So one of those other topics that you
talked about in the video was the centripetal spiral and
nautilus shells and how they can be useful in in
(10:14):
in fluid dynamics and okay, so so the gig with
this guy's uh you know, turbines, which are just rotating
devices that include a rod with blades attached to either
move a fluid or to have a fluid move through
the machine, thus generating work. UM. Turbines have existed for
a few thousand years in the form of water wheels
(10:34):
and wind meal wind meals, meals, windmills, yes, um and
the and there have been a lot of modern advancements
to these from the materials used to make them too
very precise fluid dynamic driven physical tweaks UM. But they're
still not perfect despite the best of our science, because
they involve necessary resistance due to drag, a lot of noise,
(10:57):
and continual where to their compos eonens. And this is
important research because although the turbines that we have today
work pretty well, we've got a lot of things that
would benefit from moving more smoothly through fluid, like you
know cars or airplanes. Yeah, atmosphere is a fluid, So
having that sort of smooth movement through a fluid. Studying
(11:19):
fluid dynamics, I mean, this is a complex field that
concerns a lot of different sciences and also engineers. Yeah,
and if you have a more efficiently moving car, then
you have to then you don't have to use as
much fuel. Yeah, there are multiple benefits that spill out
by this kind of study. One J Harmon, who's the
CEO of an industrial fluid dynamics design company called pack Scientific,
(11:43):
has patented a few designs based not on the age
old turbine design, but rather on the golden spiral a
k A logarithmic curve with a growth factor of Fi,
or a Fibonacci spiral or the shape of a nautilus shell. Huh. Yeah,
As it turns out, um, you can look around in
(12:04):
nature and that that shape pops up in more than
just knowledge shells right everywhere. Basically, Um, it's this really efficient,
like sturdy, space saving shape. Lots of roses have petals
arranged in this spiral. Sunflower seeds grow in the same pattern.
Pine cones and pineapples have their spines arranged and like
double five spirals, both clockwise and counterclockwise. Um, the human
(12:28):
inner ear is a golden spiral. Whirlpools are this golden spiral. Yeah.
So when you see the shape appear over and over again,
you're probably in the movie Uzumaki and you should watch out.
Or so that's really that's kind of a nonsensical Japanese
horror film. I don't I don't necessarily recommend it. The
the interesting thing I find about the shape about seeing
(12:50):
it over and over again, is that this is a
suggestion that this particular shape has worked well for its
numerous applications depending upon what it is you're looking at
the fact that you're seeing it and not a bunch
of different types of spirals. If you see one type
of spiral happening repeatedly, that might be an indication that
something's going on there that that merits further study, that
(13:12):
perhaps there are ways of taking advantage of said shape. Yeah.
Harmon maintains that creating things that either move fluid or
or move through a fluid in this shape will make
them just hella efficient, you know. Really, that's that that
is the technical science term that that it will reduce
drag to to not very much drag at all. Um.
(13:35):
He claims that it's the shape of like least resistance
conserving the most possible energy. And the idea here is
that the shape enacts a centripetal force on the fluid.
And I'm not a fluid dynamics expert, but I'm going
to attempt to explain how how this goes. So, Okay, so,
letting fluid flow through this spiral shape means that the
(13:58):
fluid molecules along the edges of the surface will experience drag,
but creating what's known as a boundary layer of slow
moving fluid at the edges of the shape, which lets
the rest of the fluid flow through the center of
the shape faster, thus creating a vortex that kind of
(14:19):
pulls the fluid through the shape. Good Lord, the fact
that you have fluid through and flow so many times
in that explanation and you managed to get through it,
it blows my mind. I was speaking like five times
as slow as flow flings fluids down by the flow. Shoot, yeah,
it's but no, that's really cool. And and you know
(14:39):
it's again. This is one of those things that you
would have to test repeatedly to see if the effects
are in fact measurable. But but it is one of
those things that on a on a on a given
level seems to make real sense. So the spiral is fascinating.
But there are also other examples of biomimicry, including the
amazing geck I tak about this in the video, and
(15:01):
I talked about how I love geckos. That is totally true.
I love I think they're the cutest things. And I've
been fortunate enough to visit Hawaii a few times. Hawaii
often if you are staying in a home in Hawaii,
which is normally where I stay, I've got a friend
who lives there. Um, all those homes are kind of
(15:22):
a gecko palaces, And so you'll wake up and you'll
just see geckos on your wall and on your ceiling,
and occasionally you need to shake out your clothes just
to make sure that you're not gonna have a gecko
surprise when you put them on. Did they No? They
they can? They could, I mean they could, they could
really nip. I mean they're they're they're they're not. Their
(15:42):
jaws are pretty small, and they tend to they are
very timid critters. They run away, they don't. They are
not the kind that want to come up to you. Yeah,
but as you talked about in the video, and as
I think we've alluded to briefly on this podcast before,
geckos have some amazing feat. Yes, they are able to
crawl up vertical surfaces. They're able to crawl across ceilings.
(16:05):
They're able to hang by a single toe from a
pane of glass. Yeah, So if you wanted to recreate
this in the lab. How would you go about doing that? Well,
you could think, maybe, oh, maybe I need to put
some kind of really sticky material like glue on my hands,
or maybe suction cups like giants suction cups. That's got
to be how they do it really well? In these
(16:29):
types of things aren't really very feasible, especially in the
long term. If you've got some kind of sticky residue
like a glue um that's not going to stick to
some types of surfaces. They're multiple problems. Why are you
going to stick to everything? To It's not necessarily going
to be easy for you to remove your hand and
then move it to the next space. And three, it
will eventually wear off if you don't have some way
(16:51):
of secreting said sticky substance. So how do they do it? Well,
they don't do it. There was sticky substance. Do they
do it? They do it through hair their nanotechnology. Yes,
they do actually, uh so. Researchers studying geckos found out
that they have nano scale beta caratin elastic hairs on
their feet and toes. And let me let me break
(17:13):
that down for you, just in case you that that
doesn't really mean a whole lot to you in the
particular configuration of words. Um, they're they're very strong, very
thin protein structures. Beta carratins are what make up like reptiles,
scales and claws and shells uh and also birds, feathers,
beaks and claws. They've got about the same toughness of
(17:34):
kitan which makes up sea bug shells, lobsters and crabs
and all that kind of stuff. Um. But they can
be really stretching in bendy, especially at the nano scale,
in which, as we have spoken about before, everything is
super wicky. Yeah. Yeah, things on the nano scale have
they behave in different ways than stuff that we're used
to on the macro scale. So when you get down
(17:56):
to the nano scale, you're actually getting small enough where
quantum effects are to take place to which is kind
of cool. Yeah. So but wait a second. I can
stick my head, which is covered in hair if you
can't see it right now, against a wall, and that
does not help me stick to the wall. So how
are these little hair like fibers Helmell. First of all,
the human hair is, you know, some hundred thousand nanometers thick,
(18:19):
so it's not nearly on the same scale. All right,
These we little hairs are so we that they interact
on a molecular level with the stuff that that walls
or glass or whatever are made of. Um, what's called
the Vanderwalls force kicks in and and whayam, the critter
can climb right up. Something. I love Oasis song about that,
(18:41):
You're my vonder Walls. What's just me? Well, all joking aside,
or at least most of it aside Vanderwall's force. This
is something that can be either an attractive force or
a repulsive force. It's not necessarily one or the It's
it's not just attraction. But this is something we talked
about on a molecular level with surfaces and their their
(19:05):
tendency to either add here or repulse. So a few
different research teams have been working on replicating this in materials.
There's a team, particularly from the Zoological Institute at the
University of Keel, that created a silicone tape that's patterned
with tiny hairs, no glue, no residue, works underwater. It
(19:25):
can be peeled off and restuck to things thousands of
times without losing its gripping power. See, I want to
have one of those toys that you used to have
where you could throw it against the wall very slowly
crawled down using this kind of approach, and you could
just throw it against the or the wall or a
window or anything and it just splats and stays there.
That would be I would have fun with that. That
(19:45):
would be minutes of a good fun. Okay, you for
you long minutes a good fun. However, I'm a simple
humanating and could easily stretch that into a full afternoon
of activities. So oh and part part of the thing
here is that these hairs aren't the only things that
that get goes have going for them in terms of
(20:06):
sticking capacity. Um, they're they're well climbing ability also involves
the curved shape of their toes um and the way
that their feet and toes spread out when they make
contact with the surface, and their toes self cleaning abilities.
Self cleaning. Now, this is kind of going back to
what we had to you know, the discussion about the
(20:28):
little projections and the moth I projections that when we
made the synthetic versions, we had to come up with
some sort of self cleaning process in order to make
the solar panels and I get all clogged up and opaque.
So what's going on here? Well, our our friendly neighborhood,
creepy Crawley researchers at the University of Akron, and I
do want to mention you. You've pronounced it in the
video Akron and that has to be fair. He was
(20:51):
talking about the planet. To be fair, that only happened
in one take, and Dan chose that take. I was,
I was, I was born in Makron, so I have
so I just I needed to point it. I understand.
I have Ohio State pride. I watched that video recently,
as in just before we went into this podcast, and
I winced when I realized that was the take he
(21:12):
went with. At any rate, Um, we we've we've mentioned
these researchers a couple of times recently, I think, and
they published some research about Getto's footprints that has helped
helped us kind of solve this puzzle a little bit further.
It turns out the getto footprints contain residue of these
thin oils called phosphilipids UM, which we're pretty sure gettos
(21:36):
excrete to keep all those little nano hairs clean UM.
And it might also help them quickly adhere to and
release from surfaces, right, So that that would make sense.
You would want to keep the hairs clear of any
debris because otherwise it would it would inhibit your exactly,
you wouldn't be able to adhere to the wall anymore.
And also, yeah, the oil making it easier to h
(21:58):
to release and then put your foot down and then
release again in order to continue motion. Uh. Again, it
makes sense. Obviously, these are things that are under continuing study.
So it's uh, it seems to be a solid hypothesis.
We'll see if it after we're able to study it further,
if it holds true. Yeah, and once once we get
(22:20):
that figured out, it might help some of these other
physical process uh researchers to to perfect the designs that
they're making. Like like, in addition to that silicone tape,
some other researchers are working with carbon nanotubes to reproduce
the physical structures of these little hairs. Man, carbon nanotubes,
why can't they do? They are magic? They are They're
(22:43):
not really, but they seem like it. No real magic,
thanks Joe. They're made by wizards. Um. The most success
that these researchers have seen so far has been with
a vertically aligned, single walled carbon nanotubes in case you
were curious, and I know you were um which could
could hypothetically have a greater maximum sticking power than the
(23:05):
original gecko feed themselves. That's pretty awesome. I have heard
of uh people determined to make kind of a wall
climbing suit using essentially this approach, using carbon nanotubes as
the gripping power for that kind of suit. So essentially,
this is a a different sort of spiky suit. We've
talked about other ones, like we talked about the spiky
(23:26):
suit that gives you an alert if there's an oncoming object,
but this, in this case, it would it would be
a totally different type of spicy suit that would allow
you to climb walls. I guess you could incorporate both
so that you could finally get a Spider Man outfit going. Well,
you still wouldn't have the webs, no, but stay tuned
for digging fans, because we might actually address some of
that in a future podcast, you know. But there are
(23:47):
a lot of other ways that bio mimicry can come
into the way we create new pieces of technology, and
especially in robotic that's a huge one, and we've talked
about that in the past two Yeah. One thing I'd
like to say about robotics is that you can look
to bio mimicry or biomemetics, not just to inspire the
(24:08):
physical designs, like okay, so we can make something like
get feed the materials right now, not just the materials,
not just the static designs, but you can use bio
memetics to program behavior. Uh. And what I had in
mind was the Boston Dynamics robots that we've talked about,
right Oh yeah, yeah, like like Big Dog, yeah, Big
Dog or the wild Cat. You know these uh, these
(24:31):
running four legged robots, or they also have bipedal robots
walking two legged robots. It's interesting that when you look
at robots, most of them, if they're going to be
moving around, they have tracks or they have wheels. Yeah.
Legs are tough. Yeah that makes sense. Wheels are very
energy efficient, they're you know, they're great, they're easy to program,
(24:55):
but but they're not good for everything. Right. We have
legs for a reason. We can do all kinds of
stuff that most robots can't do. We can climb trees,
we can scrabble over weird shaped rocks, we can we
can use them to help propel us for swimming a
lot of different There is very very versatile in the
way that wheels are not not at all. And so
it's not just the fact that we're making robots that
(25:17):
have legs that's bio mimetic, but it's also the way
that we programmed legs. I mean, when you think about this,
say you're you're programming a robot to move around, Well,
if it just has wheels, that's pretty simple. You can say,
roll this way to go forward, roll this way to
go back, you know, turn with this differential and in
the different wheels to go one way or the other.
But if you've got legs, yeah, depending upon how many
(25:41):
means you have to take into account the freedom of movement,
how many how many points of freedom of movement do
those legs have. What is the weight of the robot,
what's the momentum the robot's going to be experiencing balance
the weight on each of the four legs as they're
moving right or however many legs, because if you have
four legs is on a robot, I mean, it's not
(26:02):
obvious at what time each leg should move right. Yeah,
So there's a lot of biomimicry that goes on in
the robotics field, a lot of study of how animals
move and then attempting to engineer that so that a
robot can take advantage of this particular approach. I mean,
we've seen it in nature, how animals are able to
maneuver a depthly through an environment, And if we're able
(26:25):
to copy that, then that's a lot easier than just
trying to innovate, you know, from from nothing. Yeah. One
of my favorite biommedic designs that I've seen in robot
locomotion is something we've talked about on this podcast before.
It's the way the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot stumbles. Yeah,
if he stumbles to catch itself when it's been knocked
off balance. Right, if it if it were to step,
(26:46):
say on an unsteady rock and the rock gave way,
it would be able to stumble and catch itself or
to shift its weight around. Yeah, and in a way
that looks really unnerving lee realistic. Right. Or or or
if someone who perhaps ops when you're watching a video
appears to be an uncarrying sociopath kicks the dog, it
can catch itself. I realized, I'm that this human being
(27:09):
is probably someone who has a rich emotional life and
never never kick a real animal. But it's just that
it's probably never kicked the robot unless for strict testing purpose.
It's it's it was just one of those reactions where
you immediately think you are a bad person. They're not
a bad person. It's just that's the reaction I had
(27:29):
immediately upon watching the video of someone kicking this dog,
which not dog, but this robot, which then would catch itself. Um.
I had another one which I had to expel to include,
which was the Veloci roach. I've read about this one.
This was one of those robots that as soon as
you read about you think science there's some things you
can do and some things you should do, and those
(27:51):
two things do not always coincide. Why have you created
a robotic cockroach? It's the classic Ean Malcolm question. Your
scientists so concerned with whether or not they could, they
didn't stop to think if they should. Man and Malcolm, Yeah,
there's gonna be a point where we're just going to
do an entire podcast doing our own impressions of various celebrities,
(28:14):
and we get scientists and obviously Nick Cage is going
to be one of the three. I mean, that's going
to have to happen. You guys have already been treated
to Knowles excellent Nicholas Cage, right, Uh not, go back
and listen to our podcast about bees. I'm gonna go
ahead and call Jay Moore doing an impression of Christopher
(28:35):
walking because my impression of Christopher walking is so bad
I have to remove it, at least by one impressionist
at any rate. So the Veloci Roach Getting Back on
Track is a robot that that mimics the movement and
uh and and body size of a cockroach. They took
the cockroach as sort of the the inspiration for the
design of the robot and for its size, it's one
(28:58):
of the fastest robots for its size. You know, you
have to take the scale into consideration. Also, you can
just see it in lots of different other examples in robotics.
Is These are just a couple of the ones that
we thought would be fun to talk about, but it's
throughout the entire industry Beyond that, we're looking at biomimicry
(29:19):
for things not just technology related, but sort of on
a a civil engineering and social engineering level. Social insects
have become an area of study for that reason, because
social insects, if you were to look at an individual
insect that has uh, this kind of social structure, so
something like an ant or a b Now that particular
(29:42):
uh example, that particular individual insect, its behaviors are pretty simple. Yeah,
it's not really what we would call smart. Yeah, it's
not at all smart. It's it's pretty dumb in the
big in the big, grand scheme of things. However, the
collection of these insects can behave in very comple x
and seemingly intelligent ways and respond to dynamic changes in
(30:05):
its environment and a very impressive approach, And that kind
of thing fascinates scientists and engineers and could potentially let
us answer some questions that could end up benefiting humans
down the line. I would argue that that bees are
probably more smart than ants, but maybe only because I
know bees better. Maybe maybe we should do a future
(30:26):
of ants podcast. Yeah yeah, I don't know if you've
noticed we do insect podcasts. Yeah, yeah, well that's fair.
Just don't just don't do the same with the racknets. Okay,
make that promise for me. We promised you Okay, good.
It's an easy promise to make because we already did
that one. But anyway, so let's talk about beatles beets
(30:52):
Let's do talk about beatles, not not not the people
say we beatle around. Wow. So you took a band
that itself was a essentially a weak copy of another band.
But they're a biommedic man, do you know what that's fair?
I am going to allow it? Um all right, No,
(31:13):
I'm talking about beetles and irrigation, not irrigating your beetle.
So b E t l E. That's correct, not beatle,
but beetle. So in this case, I'm talking about an
engineer who looked at the numb beetle and was inspired
to create a way of extracting water from the air.
See this particular beetle, it tends to live in very
(31:35):
arid conditions. And one of the things that will it
does is that it will come out onto the surface
of whatever its environment is in the early morning, uh,
and will allow it allows water to collect on its shell,
it condenses upon its shell, and then it uses that
water to help survive. So the this engineer looked at
(31:57):
that and said, huh, is there something I could do
that to mimic this sort of behavior, and he came
up with a system that had a self powered pump
and a series of tubes, not unlike the internet. No wait,
I'm sorry, that's not really a series of tubes. Now,
there really was a series of tubes underground that pumped
cool air to this UH to this above ground portion
(32:20):
of the of the device. Yeah, it's called the air drop.
So the above ground portion of the air drop gets
cooled by this air that's flowing through these underground pipes,
and that that cooling means that water will condense on
the air drop and then flow down into collection area.
And specifically, this would be used to collect water to
UH to then give over to a garden um. It's
(32:43):
not a lot of water. You would not imagine it
to be a lot of water. This is for arid
locations where you're pulling tiny amounts of moisture of the air,
but it can be enough to grow certain types of plants.
So it's a really interesting approach and it also a
one It won an award. I think he got some
thing like dollars to continue to develop the idea. And
(33:05):
there are a lot of countries that are particularly interested
in looking at this approach, seeing if it's scalable, seeing
if it's if it's a practical approach. So it's really
interesting as well. Yeah, definitely. One of the other things
that we wanted to talk about was a suggestion from
um from from one of our YouTube viewers on the
video that you Jonathan did about BioMedics um and this
(33:28):
was user Magic of Dark. So, so thank you sir
or madam for for writing in so Magic of Dark.
Here here is the the scenario I'm going to paint
for you. I'm not gonna say immediately what it was
you requested, it will become a parent. But way back
in George Demistral went for a walk. Now this guy
is a Swiss engineer, all right, He's going out there,
(33:50):
he's walking. He's looking for new and exciting ways to
make hot chocolate. Yeah, you know, the way Swiss engineers do.
And eventually gets back after the end of his walk
and starts to do what any self respecting walking natural
naturalist slash engineer would do, which is starting to pick
the burrs that have accumulated on clothing and his dog
(34:11):
out of the various fabrics and hairs. If you have
a longer haired dog. Picking burrs off the dog is
a sad and very labor intensive processes. It's much easier
just to take scissors to the dog. What the dog
doesn't know? My dog. My dog is a hairy dog
and he gets birds all in his face. I have
(34:35):
had to deal with this. But my dog tends to
get them stuck in his paws. So it's also, yeah,
there's there's just but no, this is not sad story, guys.
This is a story about how the Swiss engineer looked
at these birds and how they had hooked into his
clothing and said, wait, is there a way that I
could engineer a fabric that could do the same thing
and act as a fastener, Because here I'm seeing a
(34:58):
natural substance the doing this. Could we do this? So
that's on purpose? And so he created a pair of
fabrics that complimented one another. One of those fabrics had
lots of tiny hooks in it. The other fabric had
lots of tiny hoops in it, so that the hooks
and the hoops would interlock when you put them together,
and if you pulled them apart, they could snap loose.
(35:19):
And thus velcrow was born. Now Velcrow is named after
a combination of the words velvet and crochet. If you crochet,
you use a little hook, so he wouldn't patent it
until nineteen fifty five. Of course, back in nineteen forty one,
there was a little thing called World War two that
was going on, so that was getting people really busy,
(35:41):
and the original velcrow was made from cotton. Now eventually
Mistral would switch over to nylon because cotton would wear
out after you used it for a while and nylon
was a little more resilient and end up getting an
enormous pr boost during the nineteen sixties because that's when
the space race was in full effect. And one of
the problems that NASA had was, hey, you know, if
(36:03):
we go out to space, we're in free fall. So
we're in this environment where there's weightlessness or or very
you know, micro gravity is in in in play. So
how do we keep the stuff what we bring someplace
where it's not going to get in the way. And
they came up with, hey, why don't we use this
velcrow stuff. It's it's easier than tying, especially if you're
wearing a space suit. You know, you don't have the
(36:24):
manual dexterity to necessarily tie something to something else, and
it ended up being kind of a miracle uh technology
for use during the Space Race. It was not invented
specifically for that. That often ends up being one of
those facts you'll hear things like, you know, ten technologies
NASA invented. It was invented before the Space Race, but
(36:46):
it was incredibly useful during the Space Race, and as
a result of that ended up becoming well known, so
much so that the term Velcrow is now used for
any sort of materials where it has this hook and
and loop system. Not not all of those are technically
from the company Velcrow. It's proprietary, right, But it's sort
(37:07):
of like Frisbee or rock or clean necks or band aids.
You know, the sort of thing where one example, the
primary example, becomes the name for all of the product.
It's sort of some jello same sort of thing. So anyway,
that's the story. It's pretty cool. It was a big success,
and of course we all know now that it went
on to forever replace all shoelaces. I did have Velcrow
(37:30):
sneakers early nineties. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also had hypercolor
T shirts, but that's not biomimicry. That's just awesome. I
I think that in fashion all buttons, laces, and buckles
of all kinds should be replaced by I really dislike
velcro in my clothing. I hate the noise. I can't
stand the noise. I also think all pants should have
(37:52):
elastic ankles. I don't like you anymore. I have so
many jokes, but none of them are appropriate, So I'm
going to move on. Uh. Well, the last thing I
was really gonna look at, and by look at, I
mean just talk about, because he can't really look at it,
is nanotechnology. Again, we have a really good microscope. Yeah,
and even then, if you're out talking about optical microscope,
(38:14):
you can't really look at it because if you're at
a small enough scale, you're actually so small that light
itself is not going to pick you up. So um So, anyway,
nanotechnology has become a growing industry in in the world
of science and tech, and a lot of that is
all about biomimicry, because, as it turns out, building stuff
(38:35):
on the nano scale is really hard. Like I mentioned,
we have quantum effects that can come into play there,
and and it is difficult even for us to be
able to see, let alone manipulate things down at that scale. Well,
when we've talked about molecular assemblers on this show before,
you know, that's this idea that that you'd have this
kind of almost magic machine that could on the nanoscale
(38:57):
build tiny, tiny little components and you know, make food
or make pieces for your starship. It would just build
everything molecule by molecule. Well, if that's ever possible in
real life, it seems like it's a long way away.
I mean, that's just it's so hard to imagine making
something like that. But your body has stuff in it
(39:19):
right now pretty much does that. You are doing that
as we speak. Yeah, the ribosomes in your cells are
basically molecular simblers. They're assembling molecules piece at a time.
And then you have things like viruses, which one of
those one of those things that's really difficult to classify.
(39:39):
I mean, you still have those those classic arguments of
does a virus count as life or not? Because it
exhibits many of the traits of life, but not necessarily
all of them, and it is an incredibly simple structure.
But the simple structure, which is essentially you got a
protein shell and then you've got the virus that's inside
(40:00):
the shell, and the protein shell will doc with certain
types of cells, which then allows the virus to invade
the cell and essentially take over the cells production facilities
to make more viruses which they can spread out and
do the same to other cells. Well, there could be
some actual practical uses of this in our world that
(40:20):
are not involved with making someone sick. It could be
making someone better. And the idea is to use something
like a virus shell that would have the right proteins
on it to dock with certain types of cells, specifically
cancer cells, and then you scoop out whatever the viral
material would have been inside this virus shell, and inside
(40:40):
you put chemotherapy drugs, so you can deliver chemotherapy drugs
to specific cells as opposed to a region, and in theory,
you would be able to deliver an effective medicine while
limiting the side effects as much as is possible. Right,
because one of the problems with a wide spread chemotherapy
is that it's going to make you very sick because
(41:01):
because it's getting into your your the poisons are are
getting into your other tissues, and that's bad times for you. Yeah,
it's it's if you can target specifically the cancer cells,
then yeah, you really minimize that that area effect that
you get otherwise. So it's a really promising area of research.
It's obviously incredibly complex, it's not you know, the idea
(41:23):
is simple, the execution is much more difficult. But it's
something that a lot of people are looking into. And
I got a chance a few years ago to interview
a nanotechnology expert at Emory, and he was talking about
how using viruses was one of the most promising approaches
because why invent something that needs to do a specific
(41:45):
task if there's already an example of it on nature,
which is exactly what we've been talking about this whole podcast.
So again, it's it's that the nanotechnology world is relatively
new to us and strange and unusual, but in nature,
this has been part of the way things work for
billions of years. So we should look to examples because
(42:06):
that will be at least a first step into that world,
and you know, we'll probably create new approaches that are
built on those first steps, that go beyond what nature does.
But it's a good starting point. So yeah, pretty cool stuff,
and they're probably thousands of other examples of biomimicry that
(42:26):
we could talk about tens of thous yeah, so millions
of All right, well, let's not go overboard. So but
if there, if we happen to have accidentally skipped over
one that you, dear listener hold as the most important
example of biomimicry, and you think, why didn't you talk
about this? Let us know, because we'd love to be
(42:48):
able to cover that perhaps in the future episode um
little word, though, if it's about spiders, you can hold off,
hold back that that message. And then if we didn't
talk about spiders the way you wanted us to, then
you can let us know. But really, if there are
other examples that you think, no, this is super cool
and people need to know about it, let us know.
(43:09):
And the best way to get into contact with us
is through Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus, all three places.
You can find us with the handle FW thinking and
we will talk to you again really soon. For more
on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward
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(43:42):
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