Technology that imitates nature
Biomimetics: Engineers are increasingly taking a leaf out of nature's book when looking for solutions to design problems
AFTER taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to the dog's fur. Under a microscope, he looked closely at the hook-and-loop system that the seeds have evolved to hitchhike on passing animals and aid pollination, and he realised that the same approach could be used to join other things together. The result was Velcr a product that was arguably more than three billion years in the making, since that is how long the natural mechanism that inspired it took to evolve.
Velcro is probably the most famous and certainly the most successful example of biological mimicry, or “biomimetics”. In fields from robotics to materials science, technologists are increasingly borrowing ideas from nature, and with good reason: nature's designs have, by definition, stood the test of time, so it would be foolish to ignore them. Yet transplanting natural designs into man-made technologies is still a hit-or-miss affair.

Engineers depend on biologists to discover interesting mechanisms for them to exploit, says Julian Vincent, the director of the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies at the University of Bath in England. So he and his colleagues have been working on a scheme to enable engineers to bypass the biologists and tap into nature's ingenuity directly, via a database of “biological patents”. The idea is that this database will let anyone search through a wide range of biological mechanisms and properties to find natural solutions to technological problems.

How not to reinvent the wheel
Surely human intellect, and the deliberate application of design knowledge, can devise better mechanisms than the mindless, random process of evolution? Far from it. Over billions of years of trial and error, nature has devised effective solutions to all sorts of complicated real-world problems. Take the slippery task of controlling a submersible vehicle, for example. Using propellers, it is incredibly difficult to make refined movements. But Nekton Research, a company based in Durham, North Carolina, has developed a robot fish called Madeleine that manoeuvres using fins instead.
In some cases, engineers can spend decades inventing and perfecting a new technology, only to discover that nature beat them to it. The Venus flower basket, for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge, has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are remarkably similar, both in appearance and optical properties, to commercial optical fibres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Lucent Technology's Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. And sometimes the systems found in nature can make even the most advanced technologies look primitive by comparison, she says.
The skeletons of brittlestars, which are sea creatures related to starfish and sea urchins, contain thousands of tiny lenses that collectively form a single, distributed eye. This enables brittlestars to escape predators and distinguish between night and day. Besides having unusual optical properties and being very small—each is just one-twentieth of a millimetre in diameter—the lenses have another trick of particular relevance to micro-optical systems. Although the lenses are fixed in shape, they are connected via a network of fluid-filled channels, containing a light-absorbing pigment. The creature can vary the contrast of the lenses by controlling this fluid. The same idea can be applied in man-made lenses, says Dr Aizenberg. “These are made from silicon and so cannot change their properties,” she says. But by copying the brittlestar's fluidic system, she has been able to make biomimetic lens arrays with the same flexibility.
Another demonstration of the power of biomimetics comes from the gecko. This lizard's ability to walk up walls and along ceilings is of much interest, and not only to fans of Spider-Man. Two groups of researchers, one led by Andre Geim at Manchester University and the other by Ron Fearing at the University of California, Berkeley, have independently developed ways to copy the gecko's ability to cling to walls. The secret of the gecko's success lies in the tiny hair-like structures, called setae, that cover its feet. Instead of secreting a sticky substance, as you might expect, they owe their adhesive properties to incredibly weak intermolecular attractive forces. These van der Waals forces, as they are known, which exist between any two adjacent objects, arise between the setae and the wall to which the gecko is clinging. Normally such forces are negligible, but the setae, with their spatula-like tips, maximise the surface area in contact with the wall. The weak forces, multiplied across thousands of setae, are then sufficient to hold the lizard's weight.

Both the British and American teams have shown that the intricate design of these microscopic setae can be reproduced using synthetic materials. Dr Geim calls the result “gecko tape”. The technology is still some years away from commercialisation, says Thomas Kenny of Stanford University, who is a member of Dr Fearing's group. But when it does reach the market, rather than being used to make wall-crawling gloves, it will probably be used as an alternative to Velcro, or in sticking plasters. Indeed, says Dr Kenny, it could be particularly useful in medical applications where chemical adhesives cannot be used.
While it is far from obvious that geckos' feet could inspire a new kind of sticking plaster, there are some fields—such as robotics—in which borrowing designs from nature is self-evidently the sensible thing to do. The next generation of planetary exploration vehicles being designed by America's space agency, NASA, for example, will have legs rather than wheels. That is because legs can get you places that wheels cannot, says Dr Kenny. Wheels work well on flat surfaces, but are much less efficient on uneven terrain. Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, California, are evaluating an eight-legged walking robot modelled on a scorpion, and America's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding research into four-legged robot dogs, with a view to applying the technology on the battlefield.
Having legs is only half the story—it's how you control them that counts, says Joseph Ayers, a biologist and neurophysiologist at Northeastern University, Massachusetts. He has spent recent years developing a biomimetic robotic lobster that does not just look like a lobster but actually emulates parts of a lobster's nervous system to control its walking behaviour. The control system of the scorpion robot, which is being developed by NASA in conjunction with the University of Bremen in Germany, is also biologically inspired. Meanwhile, a Finnish technology firm, Plustech, has developed a six-legged tractor for use in forestry. Clambering over fallen logs and up steep hills, it can cross terrain that would be impassable in a wheeled vehicle.
Other examples of biomimetics abound: Autotype, a materials firm, has developed a plastic film based on the complex microstructures found in moth eyes, which have evolved to collect as much light as possible without reflection. When applied to the screen of a mobile phone, the film reduces reflections and improves readability, and improves battery life since there is less need to illuminate the screen. Researchers at the University of Florida, meanwhile, have devised a coating inspired by the rough, bristly skin of sharks. It can be applied to the hulls of ships and submarines to prevent algae and barnacles from attaching themselves. At Penn State University, engineers have designed aircraft wings that can change shape in different phases of fl