As the name implies, biomimicry is the discipline of designing products by mimicking phenomena that already exist in biology and nature. The best-known example of this approach is Velcro, which was ...

Janine Benyus helped bring the word biomimicry into 21st century vocabularies in her 1997 book on the subject. Her company, The Biomimicry Group, encourages biologists at the design table to ask: how ...

When the Wright brothers were figuring out how to build an airplane, they took inspiration from some of the fliers of the natural world - birds. Nature has had a long time to perfect its ways, so why ...

Explaining biomimicry—much less getting people to buy into the concept, framework or philosophy—can be difficult. On the one hand, it is intuitive and simplistic. On the other, it is radical compared ...

Since the dawn of the industrial Revolution, manufacturers have been building things by a process that is now known as "heat, beat, and treat." That meant starting with a raw material and using ...

We all want to make our buildings more efficient and reliable. Artificial solutions abound, but evolution also holds the answers to many of our problems. Some animals and plants ingeniously adapt ...

EcoSense explores three creative and wildly different examples of biomimicry. Sometimes Mother Nature could use a boost and when we work with her natural systems, she can reward us with a blueprint ...

"Perhaps I will ask students to study bees and try to come up with a way to build a mechanical method of duplicating their flight. I will be preparing for the class over the summer," she said. She has ...

Windows that prevent bird collisions by mimicking the UV-reflective qualities of spider webs; a train that travels faster, uses less energy and makes less noise after it was redesigned to resemble a ...

The most recent update of the Da Vinci index, released in the third quarter of 2011, shows an eleven-fold increase in the incidence of biomimicry in the research pipeline since 2000, the baseline year ...