blamoscience: Seahorses get their exceptional flexibility from the structure of their bony plates, which form its external armor. The plates slide past each other as the creature moves. Shown at left is an image from a micro CT-scan of the animal, revealing the seahorse’s skeleton, as well as its bony plates. The structure, lightness and strength of many materials in nature are inspiring scientists and engineers to create new “bio-mimetic” materials that could lead to better body armor, lighter aircraft and stronger, more flexible materials. Evolution has already done a lot of the engineering work for us. I’m constantly amazed by the design inspiration we can draw from nature.
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blamoscience:

Seahorses get their exceptional flexibility from the structure of their bony plates, which form its external armor. The plates slide past each other as the creature moves. Shown at left is an image from a micro CT-scan of the animal, revealing the seahorse’s skeleton, as well as its bony plates. The structure, lightness and strength of many materials in nature are inspiring scientists and engineers to create new “bio-mimetic” materials that could lead to better body armor, lighter aircraft and stronger, more flexible materials.

Evolution has already done a lot of the engineering work for us. I’m constantly amazed by the design inspiration we can draw from nature.

(via sagansense)

Source: Flickr / jsoe

Frogfish: The Ocean’s Disguise Artists Biomimicry is one of evolution’s most mind-blowing avenues of adaptation. It’s one thing to adapt thanks to maxing out the biological limits of speed, or selecting for the ever-longer, better-feeding necks of giraffes or the ability to use a new, untapped food source at the bottom of the ocean. But to become another life form? It shows us that natural selection is not only a powerful force, but also a delicate one, fine-tuning things like colors and patterns like only the finest human artists can. Above are three examples of frogfish biomimicry, a family of fish that separately mimics algae, sponges and even sea urchins. They evolved these costumes as a way to avoid predators and become better predators themselves. Check out an in-depth post about frogfish biomimicry at Why Evolution is True (wait until you see them eat!), and if you want more here’s a whole website (Comic Sans warning!) dedicated to frogfish camo. These guys even give Peeta Mellark a run for his money:
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Frogfish: The Ocean’s Disguise Artists Biomimicry is one of evolution’s most mind-blowing avenues of adaptation. It’s one thing to adapt thanks to maxing out the biological limits of speed, or selecting for the ever-longer, better-feeding necks of giraffes or the ability to use a new, untapped food source at the bottom of the ocean. But to become another life form? It shows us that natural selection is not only a powerful force, but also a delicate one, fine-tuning things like colors and patterns like only the finest human artists can. Above are three examples of frogfish biomimicry, a family of fish that separately mimics algae, sponges and even sea urchins. They evolved these costumes as a way to avoid predators and become better predators themselves. Check out an in-depth post about frogfish biomimicry at Why Evolution is True (wait until you see them eat!), and if you want more here’s a whole website (Comic Sans warning!) dedicated to frogfish camo. These guys even give Peeta Mellark a run for his money:
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Frogfish: The Ocean’s Disguise Artists Biomimicry is one of evolution’s most mind-blowing avenues of adaptation. It’s one thing to adapt thanks to maxing out the biological limits of speed, or selecting for the ever-longer, better-feeding necks of giraffes or the ability to use a new, untapped food source at the bottom of the ocean. But to become another life form? It shows us that natural selection is not only a powerful force, but also a delicate one, fine-tuning things like colors and patterns like only the finest human artists can. Above are three examples of frogfish biomimicry, a family of fish that separately mimics algae, sponges and even sea urchins. They evolved these costumes as a way to avoid predators and become better predators themselves. Check out an in-depth post about frogfish biomimicry at Why Evolution is True (wait until you see them eat!), and if you want more here’s a whole website (Comic Sans warning!) dedicated to frogfish camo. These guys even give Peeta Mellark a run for his money:
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Frogfish: The Ocean’s Disguise Artists

Biomimicry is one of evolution’s most mind-blowing avenues of adaptation. It’s one thing to adapt thanks to maxing out the biological limits of speed, or selecting for the ever-longer, better-feeding necks of giraffes or the ability to use a new, untapped food source at the bottom of the ocean. But to become another life form? It shows us that natural selection is not only a powerful force, but also a delicate one, fine-tuning things like colors and patterns like only the finest human artists can.

Above are three examples of frogfish biomimicry, a family of fish that separately mimics algae, sponges and even sea urchins. They evolved these costumes as a way to avoid predators and become better predators themselves. Check out an in-depth post about frogfish biomimicry at Why Evolution is True (wait until you see them eat!), and if you want more here’s a whole website (Comic Sans warning!) dedicated to frogfish camo.

These guys even give Peeta Mellark a run for his money:

Glowing to Mimic Toxic Beetles This South American cockroach species has a cool trick, using fluorescent bacteria to glow in this spooky pattern at night. It turns out that they are mimicking the glow of a neighboring toxic beetle, using their little bacterial helpers. Of course when I saw it, I immediately thought of EVE. Where’s the Wall-E beetle? (via Discover Magazine)
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Glowing to Mimic Toxic Beetles This South American cockroach species has a cool trick, using fluorescent bacteria to glow in this spooky pattern at night. It turns out that they are mimicking the glow of a neighboring toxic beetle, using their little bacterial helpers. Of course when I saw it, I immediately thought of EVE. Where’s the Wall-E beetle? (via Discover Magazine)
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Glowing to Mimic Toxic Beetles

This South American cockroach species has a cool trick, using fluorescent bacteria to glow in this spooky pattern at night. It turns out that they are mimicking the glow of a neighboring toxic beetle, using their little bacterial helpers.

Of course when I saw it, I immediately thought of EVE. Where’s the Wall-E beetle?

(via Discover Magazine)

curiositycounts:

Scientists create new light source from millions of glowing E.coli. See also the E.chromi project, using “designer” color-coded bacteria for disease detection.

From the toolbox of synthetic biology, this team has assembled a screen where every pixel is an individual bacterium, responsive not to electrical impulse, but to chemical stimulus.

Giving Cameras The Best Autofocus Possible, Autofocus From The Human Eye These University of Texas scientists took a cue from Mother Nature when searching for the most advanced autofocus design on Earth. Our eyes do it better than anything we know of, so why not model it after our own lens? “Johannes Burge, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, and his advisorWilson Geisler, wondered how it was that the eyes of humans and many otheranimals were able to focus so much more efficiently than most digital cameras. In a traditional autofocus system, the camera uses only one piece of information about a scene to determine whether or not an object is in focus—its level of contrast. Contrast, says Burge, isn’t always a perfect proxy for focus. But it’s worse than that: To determine in which direction to re-focus, a camera must first change its point of focus and compare the new image it captures with the old one, to determine whether or not the object in question has a higher or lower level of contrast. Often, the camera isn’t even re-focusing in the correct direction when it captures this second image. This method of “guessing and checking” is “slow and not particularly accurate,” says Burge. Burge’s and Geisler’s approach is different. As they outlined in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their software algorithm cananalyze any still image captured from a scene and instantly know how to re-focus a lens to bring it into focus. It requires no before-and-after comparison. The way it works is that it takes an inventory of the features in a scene.” (via Scientific American, image via Flickr user vernhart - Creative Commons)
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Giving Cameras The Best Autofocus Possible, Autofocus From The Human Eye

These University of Texas scientists took a cue from Mother Nature when searching for the most advanced autofocus design on Earth. Our eyes do it better than anything we know of, so why not model it after our own lens?

“Johannes Burge, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, and his advisorWilson Geisler, wondered how it was that the eyes of humans and many otheranimals were able to focus so much more efficiently than most digital cameras. In a traditional autofocus system, the camera uses only one piece of information about a scene to determine whether or not an object is in focus—its level of contrast. Contrast, says Burge, isn’t always a perfect proxy for focus. But it’s worse than that: To determine in which direction to re-focus, a camera must first change its point of focus and compare the new image it captures with the old one, to determine whether or not the object in question has a higher or lower level of contrast. Often, the camera isn’t even re-focusing in the correct direction when it captures this second image. This method of “guessing and checking” is “slow and not particularly accurate,” says Burge.

Burge’s and Geisler’s approach is different. As they outlined in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their software algorithm cananalyze any still image captured from a scene and instantly know how to re-focus a lens to bring it into focus. It requires no before-and-after comparison. The way it works is that it takes an inventory of the features in a scene.”

(via Scientific American, image via Flickr user vernhart - Creative Commons)

Source: scientificamerican.com

Wired has a nice slideshow of several design tricks that we borrowed from Mother Nature. Or as we call it in the biz, biomimicry. Above: Shark skin naturally repels bacteria and barnacles because of its particular structure (little points called “denticles”). A company called Sharklet Technologies used it as the design behind their antibacterial coating for medical devices seen in the second picture. Images: 1) AskNature.org. 2) Sharkskin closeup/Sharklet Technologies.
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Wired has a nice slideshow of several design tricks that we borrowed from Mother Nature. Or as we call it in the biz, biomimicry. Above: Shark skin naturally repels bacteria and barnacles because of its particular structure (little points called “denticles”). A company called Sharklet Technologies used it as the design behind their antibacterial coating for medical devices seen in the second picture. Images: 1) AskNature.org. 2) Sharkskin closeup/Sharklet Technologies.
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Wired has a nice slideshow of several design tricks that we borrowed from Mother Nature. Or as we call it in the biz, biomimicry.

Above: Shark skin naturally repels bacteria and barnacles because of its particular structure (little points called “denticles”). A company called Sharklet Technologies used it as the design behind their antibacterial coating for medical devices seen in the second picture.

Images: 1) AskNature.org. 2) Sharkskin closeup/Sharklet Technologies.