Greenr - Accelerate the Change!

Many years in the making, The Biomimicry Institute’s Ask Nature portal will be formally launched tomorrow, but a few lucky visitors to Autodesk’s booth enjoyed a preview presented by the Janine.

Just one example: Janine and the team have identified 78 strategies nature uses to reduce drag. Incredible!

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I’m headed to Boston tomorrow for the annual GreenBuild conference and expo. I have two agendas, first to find a few more innovative solutions for our home project, and second to be on hand for the launch of the Biomimicry Institute’s “AskNature” database/portal:

Autodesk, a leader in design innovation technologies, has announced the sponsorship of AskNature.org, the world’s first biomimicry database, featuring biology-inspired design strategies. Architects, designers and engineers can access and harness nature’s billions of years of evolution through this free, online public-domain library, filled with some of nature’s best strategies, organized by function and explained with illustrations and in language relevant to designers. Continued…

And if you’re attending GreenBuild, let me know and lets connect!

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It’s great to see biomimicry pop up in unusual places. Here’s a blog post that asks how nature would corner faster, go further, and stop sooner:

How do we implement this into F1?

Well, I have racked my brain over this matter for a while and have come up with a few ways biomimicry could be implemented into a sport that is widely renowned as the “most technical sport in the World.”

Hopefully, by the end of this article, you might have a few ideas of your own.  Please, don’t get me wrong, some of the ideas in this article could be far too advanced to bring into the sport. I’m not a scientist, I’m just inquisitive.

Continued at Bleacher Report, the ‘open source sports network’.

Image by Edwin van Nes

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Check out the video at ABC News.

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This morning at the Biomimicry Climate Change Conference, Jay Harman (founder of PAX Scientific) announced The COMMET Project. More info to follow - this could be a critical breakthrough as the window of opportunity to create the long-term solutions is closing rapidly.

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While most people have yet to hear the term ‘biomimicry’, some are already seeking to take things to the next level by combining multiple biomimetic solutions:

Solar Botanic has designed artificial trees and plants which are so lifelike that to most casual observers they are living trees and plants. In fact, each tree or plant is a powerhouse of renewable energy harvesting the eternal profligate power of the sun, wind and rain. The essential element in this technology is Solar Botanic’s artificial leaf (Nanoleaf) which captures the sun’s radiant energy in photo voltaic and thermo voltaic cells converting the radiation into electricity. Simultaneously as the wind blows the layers of voltaic material in the stems, twigs and branches are moved, compressed and stretched, creating electricity. Press release continues…

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Making it three articles in as many months, Fortune covers the recently announced collaboration between HOK and The Biomimicry Guild:

What gets people excited about biomimicry is its potential to help solve environmental problems like climate change. If we can design buildings and products to operate more like nature, which does not pollute and creates no waste, we’d be much better off. Continued at Fortune/CNN Money…

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ZDNet looks at new research that mimics electric eel cells to produce energy:

A team of U.S. engineers has found that it’s possible to build artificial cells replicating the electrical behavior of electric eel cells. In fact, these artificial cells deliver better performance than the real ones, called electrocytes, which can generate electric potentials of up to 600 volts. Continued at ZDNet…

If you find research and development like this interesting, then set aside Monday, Oct 20th for the Biomimicry Institute’s first conference.

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Answer: A lot…

Ultimately, biomimicry seeks to understand how we ought to integrate ourselves with nature. I find hope in the principle that, in nature, there are no hard boundaries or edges; materials merge together seamlessly. Perhaps through the emulation of nature, we will come to live more symbiotically with it, and our environments will become both closer to nature and less invasive to it.

Read the complete post a:

http://greenerbuildings.com/column/2008/09/08/what-can-architecture-learn-from-nature

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A biomimicry update from a fellow Biomimicry Institute board member, and long-time cleantech commentator Joel Makower.

Will biomimicry blossom, joining green chemistry among the burgeoning tools available to build the next generation of cleaner, greener products? It remains to be seen, of course, but biomimicry makes too much common sense to be dismissed as a niche or fringe activity. If we can marry the wisdom of millions of critters with human’s unbounded ingenuity, we’ll stand a chance of effectively addressing climate change, water and energy challenges, and the need to feed and house the global village. Continued…

And be sure to check out Joel’s recently published book: Strategies for the Green Economy:

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