Blank Verse:
http://www.teenink.com/poetry/all/article/13574/Blank-Verse/
Instances:
http://www.teenink.com/fiction/realistic_fiction/article/67424/Instances/
In Focus:
http://www.teenink.com/fiction/realistic_fiction/article/61876/In-Focus/
The Polaroid:
http://figment.com/books/25438-The-Polaroid
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Book Review:
http://thatswhatwesaid.net/2012/04/book-review-miss-peregrines-home-for-peculiar-children/
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Uncovering a Revered Utopia's History
http://www.bu.edu/today/2013/uncovering-brook-farm-utopia-history/?utm_campaign=prbumain&utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook&sf15325062=1
Monday, July 22, 2013
How Fracking Affects Your Farmer’s Market by Maria Rodale
As we become more careful about what we put into our bodies, options and opportunities to be more health conscious abound: organic, non-GMO, gluten free…the list goes on. Will we soon be adding frack-free to this growing list? And even if we wanted to, would we have enough information to be able to?
As a quick reminder, fracking is a drilling technique that involves the fracturing of rock through the use of high-pressure, chemical-laced water that is pumped deep underground, releasing natural gas and oil that has been trapped in the rock for millennia. Some of the “treated” water stays underground, and some of it flows back and then needs to be “stored” or “cleaned.” Currently there is no safe way to put this wastewater back into the water cycle.
And it’s posing a highly underreported threat to our food supply and security and to our families’ health.
Where I live in the Northeast, local produce and meat from the neighboring state of Pennsylvania is a common sight, not only at our local farmers’ market but also in our local grocery stores. But a disturbing fact recently presented to me by a dear friend has given me pause about some of these local foods. In hushed conversation, my friend told me she no longer buys food from certain counties in Pennsylvania where she knows fracking is in full swing. She also told me that many of her friends and colleagues in the anti-fracking movement, in particular some of her friends in the food service business, are making similar food choices. Because of anecdotal accounts and a small but growing number of scientific studies, they sadly feel that the air and water quality in certain areas, due to fracking and fracking waste (the liquid product that comes back out of the ground once fracking occurs), has been compromised to such an extent that food grown in these areas could be a significant health hazard.
This past fall on the way to an anti-fracking rally in Philadelphia I met an organic farmer who felt the same way. “Kathy” asked me not to use her real name to protect her neighbors who are still farming. With tears in her eyes, Kathy said she and her husband recently sold their organic farm in Pennsylvania, which they had carefully tended for 20 years, two years after a well went in less than a half mile from their farm. Kathy said: “We can’t in good conscience say our food is organic, as we no longer are sure about what chemicals are leaching into our soil through our water and through air contamination. The safety of our well water and the chemicals in our air may be doing real damage to our fields.” Kathy and her husband had chosen not to sell their land leases, but absentee landowners who own the property next to them made a different decision.
Recent studies by Penn State and Cornell found that in Pennsylvania counties with at least 10,000 dairy cows, those that had at least 150 Marcellus Shale wells experienced a 16 percent average decline in the number of dairy cows between 2007 and 2010, compared with a 3 percent increase in counties without shale gas wells. The counties with the wells saw an 18.5 percent decrease in milk production; counties without wells experienced an increase in milk production.
At a June 2013 panel discussion on Food, Farms, and Fracking in California, Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, addressed this issue and stated that “fracking pollution poses a real risk to our food sheds, organic farms, and all aspects of food production.”
As fracking expands into areas that are home to some of the most productive farmland in the world, questions need to be raised regarding the long-term safety for the agricultural industry. According to the Catskill Mountainkeeper, fracking and fracking waste can threaten our food supply in the following ways:
• Soil acidity increases in the vicinity of oil and gas pipelines where flaring occurs, reducing the amount of usable essential nutrients in the soil such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Fracking also releases toxic heavy metals like arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury into soils. Humans and animals that eat these plants are exposed to these heavy metals, which can accumulate in body tissues and cause serious damage.
• Wastewater from fracking can contain high levels of radioactivity. When wastewater is released into our streams and rivers without adequate radiation treatment, highly radioactive elements like uranium and radium, which had previously been safely trapped thousands of feet below the surface, can then enter the food chain and bioaccumulate in humans, plants, and animals just as heavy metals do.
• Many of the chemicals added to create fracking fluid are also known endocrine disruptors, chemicals that interfere with the body’s natural signaling system. Frack fluid, however, is a “proprietary mix,” and we aren’t fully knowledgeable about all the chemicals that may be in this fluid.
• Improperly handled fracking fluids can also contaminate surface water. Even a small spill of the highly toxic mixture can have large impacts on the surrounding livestock and wildlife. When meat and produce are grown in toxic conditions, the toxic contamination doesn’t stop at the farm field. Contaminated fruits, vegetables, and meats can be shipped all over the country, potentially poisoning people hundreds or thousands of miles away from the frack source. Unfortunately, most foods are not adequately inspected for chemical contamination and residue. Furthermore, since the gas companies are not required to disclose the chemicals within fracking fluid, government regulatory organizations may not even know what to test for.
So how we are fighting back? Several states are now fighting for bans on fracking waste disposal, treatment, transportation, and storage. And caution warnings have not only been issued in the US. In Germany, the Brewers Union is concerned that fracking there could disrupt the water supply to such an extent that the country’s Beer Purity Law might be violated. The water purity laws date back to 1516 and are designed to ensure that German beer is kept simple, pure, and free from contamination.
As a parent I carefully read labels and follow guides like those issued by the Environmental Working Group on how to choose foods with low or no chemicals. Knowing the potential risks that may exist to our food because of fracking, how am I supposed to understand, assess, and carefully monitor the potential for hazardous chemicals that may now be in our food chain?
Isn’t it in ALL our best interests (health, environmental, and economic) to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the impacts, both immediate and cumulative, from fracking are either benign or potentially serious? In the US, fracking or its by-products already do or have the potential to directly impact citizens of the following states and their air or water supplies: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wyoming. (And this is before we consider the states that might be importing food products from these states!) We currently have a big supply of gas, and there is no rush to frack.
So, President Obama, contrary to the some of the statements you made about natural gas in your wonderful climate change speech on June 25th, 2013, please don’t be in a hurry to expand natural gas production just yet! You need to show me, my family, my friends, and their families that fracking and fracking waste aren’t going to negatively impact the foods that our families eat, the water we drink, and the air that we breathe!
Source: http://blogs.prevention.com/marias-farm-country-kitchen/2013/07/18/how-fracking-affects-your-farmers-market/?cm_mmc=Facebook-_-Prevention-_-blogs-mariasfarmcountrykitchen-_-HouwFrackingAffectsYourFarmersMarket
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Indian Engineers Build A Stronger Society With School Lunch Program by Shankar Vedantam
At a government-run public middle school in Bangalore, the
blackboard's cracking, the textbooks are tattered and most of the
students are barefoot.
But with all those challenges, the biggest obstacle that teachers face in keeping kids in school is hunger. Many students show up at school having had nothing to eat for breakfast.
On mornings one student comes to school hungry, the thought of school makes her break down, she says.
"When I had to get on the bus, I would start crying," says K. Suchitra, 13.
Suchitra is an unusually talented student, says her teacher, Sheelavati Shakti. She shows a strong aptitude for music and dance, and is strong academically.
But when she joined this school a year ago, Suchitra looked unhealthy, Shakti says. Her skin was discolored, but she didn't have an infection; she was just malnourished.
Suchitra's life has recently been turned around, however. An ambitious school lunch program now supplies kids at her middle school with a nutritious, freshly cooked meal. On days she comes to school hungry, she knows she can eat at school.
"After eating this food I've become stronger," Suchitra says. "That's why I'm able to come to school and study and play."
The skin discoloration disappeared after she started the lunch program, Suchitra says. But the program has done more than improve her physical health; it's allowed her to dream of a better life. She now imagines going to college to study science. And one day, she says, she hopes to become a software engineer.
The lunch program that provides meals to Suchitra's school currently feeds 1.3 million children across India, making it one of the largest school lunch programs in the world.
Ryan Lobo for NPR
It was initially begun more than a decade ago as part of the religious outreach of a Hindu group known as , better known in the West as the Hare Krishna movement.
The Hindu group is still actively involved in the program. But the lunch program is now operated as a secular, public-private partnership, serving poor children of all backgrounds.
Government officials supply grain and other lunch ingredients at a discount, and provide a cash subsidy. Donors from India and around the world supply the rest.
"Feeding a child is not charity," says Shridhar Venkat, who directs the lunch program through the . He used to be a corporate executive. To him, a child like Suchitra is not a hungry 13-year-old girl in poverty. She's an opportunity, and giving her lunch is an investment. Tomorrow, an educated Suchitra could produce a huge return on that investment to her community, he said.
The program prepares most of the food using centralized kitchens. Some 17,000 pounds of rice and 4,500 gallons of soup are produced by one kitchen in Bangalore. Engineers have designed the kitchen and the logistics of delivering the food to schools.
"We have never failed to deliver a meal on any day in the last 11 years," Venkat says.
Ryan Lobo for NPR
The program is so cost-effective it's become a Harvard Business School .
Today it costs only about 11 cents to place a meal before each child.
By 2020, the program hopes to feed 5 million children every day.
The combination of efficiency and high purpose makes for a strange marriage: ruthlessly efficient corporate management techniques married to a goal that is deeply emotional.
"We want to do things with heart," Venkat says. "It's not just, 'build large kitchens.' All these large kitchens have a big heart."
Venkat is constantly looking for ways to increase efficiency so the program can feed more children. He studies the data to see if the lunch program is having a discernible effect. He's recently noticed more children are coming to school on one particular day each week: the day the lunch program includes dessert.
Venkat said he was going to try to use the inducement of dessert to get kids to come to school. Typically, the children know on which day dessert is going to be included in lunch.
"We are trying to make it a secret, so they keep guessing and they come to school," he says with a laugh.
Independent of the program have found it's having a profound effect.
"The school attendance goes up, malnutrition level comes down, dropout rates comes down," Venkat says.
But besides the statistics, Venkat says he regularly sees the human face of the results.
A young man recently visited Venkat. He was in one of the earliest cohorts of children who've been helped by the lunch program.
The man told Venkat he was the son of a security guard. When the son was in the eighth grade, his father was earning less than a dollar a day. He was so hungry, he used to faint at school. Academically, he was scraping by. Then, the free lunch program started.
"He told me, 'My attention span went up. My concentration went up,'" Venkat says. So did the boy's grades. He went on to college and became an engineer. When the young man visited Venkat, he handed him an envelope.
"And the envelope ... had an offer letter from India's leading multinational software company as a software programmer," Venkat says.
But with all those challenges, the biggest obstacle that teachers face in keeping kids in school is hunger. Many students show up at school having had nothing to eat for breakfast.
On mornings one student comes to school hungry, the thought of school makes her break down, she says.
"When I had to get on the bus, I would start crying," says K. Suchitra, 13.
Suchitra is an unusually talented student, says her teacher, Sheelavati Shakti. She shows a strong aptitude for music and dance, and is strong academically.
But when she joined this school a year ago, Suchitra looked unhealthy, Shakti says. Her skin was discolored, but she didn't have an infection; she was just malnourished.
Suchitra's life has recently been turned around, however. An ambitious school lunch program now supplies kids at her middle school with a nutritious, freshly cooked meal. On days she comes to school hungry, she knows she can eat at school.
"After eating this food I've become stronger," Suchitra says. "That's why I'm able to come to school and study and play."
The skin discoloration disappeared after she started the lunch program, Suchitra says. But the program has done more than improve her physical health; it's allowed her to dream of a better life. She now imagines going to college to study science. And one day, she says, she hopes to become a software engineer.
The lunch program that provides meals to Suchitra's school currently feeds 1.3 million children across India, making it one of the largest school lunch programs in the world.
Shridhar Venkat is the director of the
Akshaya Patra Foundation, which runs one of the largest school lunch
programs in the world in India
The Hindu group is still actively involved in the program. But the lunch program is now operated as a secular, public-private partnership, serving poor children of all backgrounds.
Government officials supply grain and other lunch ingredients at a discount, and provide a cash subsidy. Donors from India and around the world supply the rest.
"Feeding a child is not charity," says Shridhar Venkat, who directs the lunch program through the . He used to be a corporate executive. To him, a child like Suchitra is not a hungry 13-year-old girl in poverty. She's an opportunity, and giving her lunch is an investment. Tomorrow, an educated Suchitra could produce a huge return on that investment to her community, he said.
The program prepares most of the food using centralized kitchens. Some 17,000 pounds of rice and 4,500 gallons of soup are produced by one kitchen in Bangalore. Engineers have designed the kitchen and the logistics of delivering the food to schools.
"We have never failed to deliver a meal on any day in the last 11 years," Venkat says.
On days she comes to school hungry, K. Suchitra (center) knows she can eat at school.
The combination of efficiency and high purpose makes for a strange marriage: ruthlessly efficient corporate management techniques married to a goal that is deeply emotional.
"We want to do things with heart," Venkat says. "It's not just, 'build large kitchens.' All these large kitchens have a big heart."
Venkat is constantly looking for ways to increase efficiency so the program can feed more children. He studies the data to see if the lunch program is having a discernible effect. He's recently noticed more children are coming to school on one particular day each week: the day the lunch program includes dessert.
Venkat said he was going to try to use the inducement of dessert to get kids to come to school. Typically, the children know on which day dessert is going to be included in lunch.
"We are trying to make it a secret, so they keep guessing and they come to school," he says with a laugh.
Independent of the program have found it's having a profound effect.
"The school attendance goes up, malnutrition level comes down, dropout rates comes down," Venkat says.
But besides the statistics, Venkat says he regularly sees the human face of the results.
A young man recently visited Venkat. He was in one of the earliest cohorts of children who've been helped by the lunch program.
The man told Venkat he was the son of a security guard. When the son was in the eighth grade, his father was earning less than a dollar a day. He was so hungry, he used to faint at school. Academically, he was scraping by. Then, the free lunch program started.
"He told me, 'My attention span went up. My concentration went up,'" Venkat says. So did the boy's grades. He went on to college and became an engineer. When the young man visited Venkat, he handed him an envelope.
"And the envelope ... had an offer letter from India's leading multinational software company as a software programmer," Venkat says.
Biomimetics: Design by Nature by Tom Mueller
One cloudless midsummer day in February, Andrew Parker, an
evolutionary biologist, knelt in the baking red sand of the Australian
outback just south of Alice Springs and eased the right hind leg of a
thorny devil into a dish of water. The maneuver was not as risky as it
sounds: Though covered with sharp spines, the lizard stood only about an
inch high at the shoulder, and it looked up at Parker apprehensively,
like a baby dinosaur that had lost its mother. It seemed too cute for
its harsh surroundings, home to an alarmingly high percentage of the
world's most venomous snakes, including the inland taipan, which can
kill a hundred people with an ounce of its venom, and the desert death
adder, whose name pretty well says it all. Fierce too is the landscape
itself, where the wind hissing through the mulga trees feels like a blow
dryer on max, and the sun seems three times its size in temperate
climes. Constant reminders that here, in the driest part of the world’s
driest inhabited continent, you’d better have a good plan for where your
next drink is coming from.
This the thorny devil knows, with an elegance and certainty that fascinated Parker beyond all thought of snakebite or sunstroke. “Look, look!” he exclaimed. “Its back is completely drenched!” Sure enough, after 30 seconds, water from the dish had wicked up the lizard’s leg and was glistening all over its prickly hide. In a few seconds more the water reached its mouth, and the lizard began to smack its jaws with evident satisfaction. It was, in essence, drinking through its foot. Given more time, the thorny devil can perform this same conjuring trick on a patch of damp sand—a vital competitive advantage in the desert. Parker had come here to discover precisely how it does this, not from purely biological interest, but with a concrete purpose in mind: to make a thorny-devil-inspired device that will help people collect lifesaving water in the desert.
A slender English academic with wavy, honey-blond hair beneath a wide-brimmed sun hat, Parker busied himself with eyedroppers, misters, and various colored powders, the better to understand the thorny devil’s water-collecting alchemy. Now and then he made soft, bell-like, English-academic sounds of surprise and delight. “The water’s spreading out incredibly fast!” he said, as drops from his eyedropper fell onto the lizard’s back and vanished, like magic. “Its skin is far more hydrophobic than I thought. There may well be hidden capillaries, channeling the water into the mouth.” After completing his last experiment, we gathered up his equipment and walked back to our Land Cruiser. The lizard watched us leave with a faint look of bereavement. “Seeing the devil in its natural environment was crucial to understanding the nature of its adaptations—the texture of the sand, the amount of shade, the quality of the light,” Parker said as we drove back to camp. “We’ve done the macro work. Now I’m ready to look at the microstructure of its skin.”
A research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Sydney, Parker is a leading proponent of biomimetics—applying designs from nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields. He has investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective coatings in moth eyes—studies that have led to brighter screens for cellular phones and an anticounterfeiting technique so secret he can’t say which company is behind it. He is working with Procter & Gamble and Yves Saint Laurent to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen of diatoms, and with the British Ministry of Defense to emulate their water-repellent properties. He even draws inspiration from nature’s past: On the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber he saw in a museum in Warsaw, Poland, he noticed microscopic corrugations that reduced light reflection. They are now being built into solar panels.
Parker’s work is only a small part of an increasingly vigorous, global biomimetics movement. Engineers in Bath, England, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, are pondering the bumps on the leading edges of humpback whale flukes to learn how to make airplane wings for more agile flight. In Berlin, Germany, the fingerlike primary feathers of raptors are inspiring engineers to develop wings that change shape aloft to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Architects in Zimbabwe are studying how termites regulate temperature, humidity, and airflow in their mounds in order to build more comfortable buildings, while Japanese medical researchers are reducing the pain of an injection by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like those on a mosquito’s proboscis, minimizing nerve stimulation.
“Biomimetics brings in a whole different set of tools and ideas you wouldn’t otherwise have,” says materials scientist Michael Rubner of MIT, where biomimetics has entered the curriculum. “It’s now built into our group culture.”
Shortly after our trip to the Australian desert, I met up with Andrew Parker again, in London, to watch the next phase of his research into the thorny devil. Walking from the Natural History Museum’s entrance to his laboratory on the sixth floor, we traversed warehouse-size halls filled with preserved organisms of the most exuberant variety. In one room were waist-high alcohol jars of grimacing sea otters, pythons, spiny echidnas, and wallabies, and one 65-foot-long case containing a giant squid. Other rooms held displays of gaudy hummingbirds, over-the-top toucans and majestic bowerbirds, and shelf after shelf filled with beetles as bright as gemstones: emerald-green scarabs, sapphire-blue Cyphogastras, and opalescent weevils.
To Parker this was not a mere collection of specimens, but “a treasure-trove of brilliant design.” Every species, even those that have gone extinct, is a success story, optimized by millions of years of natural selection. Why not learn from what evolution has wrought? As we walked, Parker explained how the metallic sheen and dazzling colors of tropical birds and beetles derive not from pigments, but from optical features: neatly spaced microstructures that reflect specific wavelengths of light. Such structural color, fade-proof and more brilliant than pigment, is of great interest to people who manufacture paint, cosmetics, and those little holograms on credit cards. Toucan bills are a model of lightweight strength (they can crack nuts, yet are light enough not to seriously impede the bird’s flight), while hedgehog spines and porcupine quills are marvels of structural economy and resilience. Spider silk is five times stronger by weight and vastly more ductile than high-grade steel. Insects offer an embarrassment of design riches. Glowworms produce a cool light with almost zero energy loss (a normal incandescent bulb wastes 98 percent of its energy as heat), and bombardier beetles have a high-efficiency combustion chamber in their posterior that shoots boiling-hot chemicals at would-be predators. The Melanophila beetle, which lays its eggs in freshly burned wood, has evolved a structure that can detect the precise infrared radiation produced by a forest fire, allowing it to sense a blaze a hundred kilometers away. This talent is currently being explored by the United States Air Force.
“I could look through here and find 50 biomimetics projects in half an hour,” Parker said. “I try not to walk here in the evening, because I end up getting carried away and working until midnight.”
In one such late-night creative burst eight years ago, Parker decided to investigate the water-gathering skills of a desert beetle by building an enormous sand dune in his laboratory. This tenebrionid beetle flourishes in the Namib Desert in southwestern Africa, one of the world’s hottest, driest environments. The beetle drinks by harvesting morning fogs, facing into the wind and hoisting its behind, where hydrophilic bumps capture the fog and cause it to coalesce into larger droplets, which then roll down the waxy, hydrophobic troughs between the bumps, reaching the beetle’s mouth. Parker imported several dozen beetles from Namibia, which promptly scampered all over the lab when he opened the box, but eventually settled contentedly on the dune. There, using a hair dryer and various misters and spray bottles, Parker simulated the conditions in the Namib Desert well enough to understand the beetle’s mechanism. He then replicated it on a microscope slide, using tiny glass beads for the bumps and wax for the troughs.
For all nature’s sophistication, many of its clever devices are made from simple materials like keratin, calcium carbonate, and silica, which nature manipulates into structures of fantastic complexity, strength, and toughness. The abalone, for example, makes its shell out of calcium carbonate, the same stuff as soft chalk. Yet by coaxing this material into walls of staggered, nanoscale bricks through a subtle play of proteins, it creates an armor as tough as Kevlar—3,000 times harder than chalk. Understanding the microscale and nanoscale structures responsible for a living material’s exceptional properties is critical to re-creating it synthetically. So today Andrew Parker had arranged to view the skin of a thorny devil museum specimen under a scanning electron microscope, hoping to find the hidden structures that allow it to absorb and channel water so effectively.
With a microscopist at the helm, we soared over the surface of the thorny devil’s skin like a deep-space probe orbiting a distant planet, dipping down now and then at Parker’s request to explore some curious feature of the terrain. There seemed to be little of interest in the Matterhornlike macrostructure of an individual thorn, though Parker speculated that it might wick away heat from the lizard’s body or perhaps help capture the morning dew. Halfway down the thorn, however, he noticed a series of nodules set in rows, which seemed to grade down to a larger water-collection structure. Finally we dove into a crevasse at the base of the thorn and encountered a honeycomb-like field of indentations, each 25 microns across.
“Ah-ha!” Parker exclaimed, like Sherlock Holmes alighting upon a clue. “This is clearly a superhydrophobic surface for channeling water between the scales.” A subsequent examination of the thorny devil’s skin with an instrument called a micro-CT scanner confirmed his theory, revealing tiny capillaries between the scales evidently designed to guide water toward the lizard’s mouth. “I think we’ve pretty well cracked the thorny devil structure,” he said. “We’re ready to make a prototype.”
Enter the engineers. As the next phase in his quest to create a water-collection device inspired by the lizard, Parker sent his observations and experimental results to Michael Rubner and his MIT colleague Robert Cohen, a chemical engineer with whom he has worked on several biomimetics projects in the past. Rubner and Cohen are neatly groomed gentlemen who speak in clipped phrases and look frequently at their watches. While Parker likes to explain his work via a stroll through a botanic garden or by pulling out drawerfuls of bright beetles in a museum, they are more likely to draw a tidy graph of force over time, or flip through a PowerPoint presentation on their laptop. But a pooling of biological insight and engineering pragmatism is vital to success in biomimetics, and in the case of Parker, Cohen, and Rubner, it has led to several promising applications inspired by the Namib beetle and other insects. Using a robotic arm that, in a predetermined sequence, dips slides into a series of nanoparticle suspensions and other exotic ingredients, they have assembled materials layer by layer that have the same special properties as the organisms. Soon they hope to apply the method to create a synthetic surface inspired by thorny devil skin.
Though impressed by biological structures, Cohen and Rubner consider nature merely a starting point for innovation. “You don’t have to reproduce a lizard skin to make a water collection device, or a moth eye to make an antireflective coating,” Cohen says. “The natural structure provides a clue to what is useful in a mechanism. But maybe you can do it better.” Lessons from the thorny devil may enhance the water-collection technology they have developed based on the microstructure of the Namib beetle, which they’re working to make into water-harvesting materials, graffiti-proof paints, and self-decontaminating surfaces for kitchens and hospitals. Or the work may take them in entirely new directions. Ultimately they consider a biomimetics project a success only if it has the potential to make a useful tool for people. “Looking at pretty structures in nature is not sufficient,” says Cohen. “What I want to know is, Can we actually transform these structures into an embodiment with true utility in the real world?”
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/04/biomimetics/tom-mueller-text.html
This the thorny devil knows, with an elegance and certainty that fascinated Parker beyond all thought of snakebite or sunstroke. “Look, look!” he exclaimed. “Its back is completely drenched!” Sure enough, after 30 seconds, water from the dish had wicked up the lizard’s leg and was glistening all over its prickly hide. In a few seconds more the water reached its mouth, and the lizard began to smack its jaws with evident satisfaction. It was, in essence, drinking through its foot. Given more time, the thorny devil can perform this same conjuring trick on a patch of damp sand—a vital competitive advantage in the desert. Parker had come here to discover precisely how it does this, not from purely biological interest, but with a concrete purpose in mind: to make a thorny-devil-inspired device that will help people collect lifesaving water in the desert.
A slender English academic with wavy, honey-blond hair beneath a wide-brimmed sun hat, Parker busied himself with eyedroppers, misters, and various colored powders, the better to understand the thorny devil’s water-collecting alchemy. Now and then he made soft, bell-like, English-academic sounds of surprise and delight. “The water’s spreading out incredibly fast!” he said, as drops from his eyedropper fell onto the lizard’s back and vanished, like magic. “Its skin is far more hydrophobic than I thought. There may well be hidden capillaries, channeling the water into the mouth.” After completing his last experiment, we gathered up his equipment and walked back to our Land Cruiser. The lizard watched us leave with a faint look of bereavement. “Seeing the devil in its natural environment was crucial to understanding the nature of its adaptations—the texture of the sand, the amount of shade, the quality of the light,” Parker said as we drove back to camp. “We’ve done the macro work. Now I’m ready to look at the microstructure of its skin.”
A research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Sydney, Parker is a leading proponent of biomimetics—applying designs from nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields. He has investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective coatings in moth eyes—studies that have led to brighter screens for cellular phones and an anticounterfeiting technique so secret he can’t say which company is behind it. He is working with Procter & Gamble and Yves Saint Laurent to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen of diatoms, and with the British Ministry of Defense to emulate their water-repellent properties. He even draws inspiration from nature’s past: On the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber he saw in a museum in Warsaw, Poland, he noticed microscopic corrugations that reduced light reflection. They are now being built into solar panels.
Parker’s work is only a small part of an increasingly vigorous, global biomimetics movement. Engineers in Bath, England, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, are pondering the bumps on the leading edges of humpback whale flukes to learn how to make airplane wings for more agile flight. In Berlin, Germany, the fingerlike primary feathers of raptors are inspiring engineers to develop wings that change shape aloft to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Architects in Zimbabwe are studying how termites regulate temperature, humidity, and airflow in their mounds in order to build more comfortable buildings, while Japanese medical researchers are reducing the pain of an injection by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like those on a mosquito’s proboscis, minimizing nerve stimulation.
“Biomimetics brings in a whole different set of tools and ideas you wouldn’t otherwise have,” says materials scientist Michael Rubner of MIT, where biomimetics has entered the curriculum. “It’s now built into our group culture.”
Shortly after our trip to the Australian desert, I met up with Andrew Parker again, in London, to watch the next phase of his research into the thorny devil. Walking from the Natural History Museum’s entrance to his laboratory on the sixth floor, we traversed warehouse-size halls filled with preserved organisms of the most exuberant variety. In one room were waist-high alcohol jars of grimacing sea otters, pythons, spiny echidnas, and wallabies, and one 65-foot-long case containing a giant squid. Other rooms held displays of gaudy hummingbirds, over-the-top toucans and majestic bowerbirds, and shelf after shelf filled with beetles as bright as gemstones: emerald-green scarabs, sapphire-blue Cyphogastras, and opalescent weevils.
To Parker this was not a mere collection of specimens, but “a treasure-trove of brilliant design.” Every species, even those that have gone extinct, is a success story, optimized by millions of years of natural selection. Why not learn from what evolution has wrought? As we walked, Parker explained how the metallic sheen and dazzling colors of tropical birds and beetles derive not from pigments, but from optical features: neatly spaced microstructures that reflect specific wavelengths of light. Such structural color, fade-proof and more brilliant than pigment, is of great interest to people who manufacture paint, cosmetics, and those little holograms on credit cards. Toucan bills are a model of lightweight strength (they can crack nuts, yet are light enough not to seriously impede the bird’s flight), while hedgehog spines and porcupine quills are marvels of structural economy and resilience. Spider silk is five times stronger by weight and vastly more ductile than high-grade steel. Insects offer an embarrassment of design riches. Glowworms produce a cool light with almost zero energy loss (a normal incandescent bulb wastes 98 percent of its energy as heat), and bombardier beetles have a high-efficiency combustion chamber in their posterior that shoots boiling-hot chemicals at would-be predators. The Melanophila beetle, which lays its eggs in freshly burned wood, has evolved a structure that can detect the precise infrared radiation produced by a forest fire, allowing it to sense a blaze a hundred kilometers away. This talent is currently being explored by the United States Air Force.
“I could look through here and find 50 biomimetics projects in half an hour,” Parker said. “I try not to walk here in the evening, because I end up getting carried away and working until midnight.”
In one such late-night creative burst eight years ago, Parker decided to investigate the water-gathering skills of a desert beetle by building an enormous sand dune in his laboratory. This tenebrionid beetle flourishes in the Namib Desert in southwestern Africa, one of the world’s hottest, driest environments. The beetle drinks by harvesting morning fogs, facing into the wind and hoisting its behind, where hydrophilic bumps capture the fog and cause it to coalesce into larger droplets, which then roll down the waxy, hydrophobic troughs between the bumps, reaching the beetle’s mouth. Parker imported several dozen beetles from Namibia, which promptly scampered all over the lab when he opened the box, but eventually settled contentedly on the dune. There, using a hair dryer and various misters and spray bottles, Parker simulated the conditions in the Namib Desert well enough to understand the beetle’s mechanism. He then replicated it on a microscope slide, using tiny glass beads for the bumps and wax for the troughs.
For all nature’s sophistication, many of its clever devices are made from simple materials like keratin, calcium carbonate, and silica, which nature manipulates into structures of fantastic complexity, strength, and toughness. The abalone, for example, makes its shell out of calcium carbonate, the same stuff as soft chalk. Yet by coaxing this material into walls of staggered, nanoscale bricks through a subtle play of proteins, it creates an armor as tough as Kevlar—3,000 times harder than chalk. Understanding the microscale and nanoscale structures responsible for a living material’s exceptional properties is critical to re-creating it synthetically. So today Andrew Parker had arranged to view the skin of a thorny devil museum specimen under a scanning electron microscope, hoping to find the hidden structures that allow it to absorb and channel water so effectively.
With a microscopist at the helm, we soared over the surface of the thorny devil’s skin like a deep-space probe orbiting a distant planet, dipping down now and then at Parker’s request to explore some curious feature of the terrain. There seemed to be little of interest in the Matterhornlike macrostructure of an individual thorn, though Parker speculated that it might wick away heat from the lizard’s body or perhaps help capture the morning dew. Halfway down the thorn, however, he noticed a series of nodules set in rows, which seemed to grade down to a larger water-collection structure. Finally we dove into a crevasse at the base of the thorn and encountered a honeycomb-like field of indentations, each 25 microns across.
“Ah-ha!” Parker exclaimed, like Sherlock Holmes alighting upon a clue. “This is clearly a superhydrophobic surface for channeling water between the scales.” A subsequent examination of the thorny devil’s skin with an instrument called a micro-CT scanner confirmed his theory, revealing tiny capillaries between the scales evidently designed to guide water toward the lizard’s mouth. “I think we’ve pretty well cracked the thorny devil structure,” he said. “We’re ready to make a prototype.”
Enter the engineers. As the next phase in his quest to create a water-collection device inspired by the lizard, Parker sent his observations and experimental results to Michael Rubner and his MIT colleague Robert Cohen, a chemical engineer with whom he has worked on several biomimetics projects in the past. Rubner and Cohen are neatly groomed gentlemen who speak in clipped phrases and look frequently at their watches. While Parker likes to explain his work via a stroll through a botanic garden or by pulling out drawerfuls of bright beetles in a museum, they are more likely to draw a tidy graph of force over time, or flip through a PowerPoint presentation on their laptop. But a pooling of biological insight and engineering pragmatism is vital to success in biomimetics, and in the case of Parker, Cohen, and Rubner, it has led to several promising applications inspired by the Namib beetle and other insects. Using a robotic arm that, in a predetermined sequence, dips slides into a series of nanoparticle suspensions and other exotic ingredients, they have assembled materials layer by layer that have the same special properties as the organisms. Soon they hope to apply the method to create a synthetic surface inspired by thorny devil skin.
Though impressed by biological structures, Cohen and Rubner consider nature merely a starting point for innovation. “You don’t have to reproduce a lizard skin to make a water collection device, or a moth eye to make an antireflective coating,” Cohen says. “The natural structure provides a clue to what is useful in a mechanism. But maybe you can do it better.” Lessons from the thorny devil may enhance the water-collection technology they have developed based on the microstructure of the Namib beetle, which they’re working to make into water-harvesting materials, graffiti-proof paints, and self-decontaminating surfaces for kitchens and hospitals. Or the work may take them in entirely new directions. Ultimately they consider a biomimetics project a success only if it has the potential to make a useful tool for people. “Looking at pretty structures in nature is not sufficient,” says Cohen. “What I want to know is, Can we actually transform these structures into an embodiment with true utility in the real world?”
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/04/biomimetics/tom-mueller-text.html
Butting Heads Over Skull Injuries and Dinosaur Head-Butts by Ed Yong
You don’t get to headbutt your way through life without picking
up a few scars along the way. If you repeatedly ram your skull against
your peers, you’ll pick up injuries, especially on the parts that suffer
the most impacts. And when you die, your skeleton will preserve a
record of your violent past.
Joseph Peterson from the University of Wisconsin has used this principle to study the lifestyle of a group of dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs. The name comes from the Greek for “thick-headed lizards” and refers to the group’s most distinctive feature—a thick dome atop their skulls, usually fringed with small spikes. What was it for?
The most popular answer is that these dinosaurs used their skulls as battering rams, charging each other head-on to fight over mates, territories or both. The domes would have protected their brain during such collisions. But other dinosaur specialists, like Mark Goodwin and Jack Horner, have said that the dome was too brittle to be used as a ram. Instead, they think it was a billboard. The domes helped pachycephalosaurs to identify members of their own species; maybe they were even brightly coloured to patterned to attract the opposite sex.
The billboard idea, in turn, has its problems. Critics point out that the domes are much the same across different pachycephalosaur species, and change dramatically in shape as the animals grow up. They’re hardly not the best badges of identity.
Peterson approached this debate from a new angle. He was inspired by a specimen of Pachycephalosaurus
at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Illinois, which
has large dents on the top of the dome. Perhaps these were the result of
a collision with another individual? “No one paid much attention to
them until we started thinking about how common those types of features
really were,” says Peterson.
Together with Collin Dischler and Nicholas Longrich, he spent five years studying the domes of 109 pachycephalosaurs from over 14 species, searching for irregularities. He found a lot, including fractures that had since healed, and thick, irregular surfaces that indicated past infection and inflammation. And to his surprise, 22 percent of the domes across 9 species showed signs of damage. “That’s much higher than we expected,” says Peterson.
Other palaeontologists had noticed these features before. “A lot of
us, me included, had always assumed they were the result of erosion
after the death of the animal,” says Andy Farke
from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Palaeontology. He means that the
skulls might have been pitted by pebbles in a stream, or damaged by
bone-eating worms, for example. “The new study pretty convincingly shows
that this isn’t the case—these features are something that happened
during the lifetime of the animal.” (Farke himself has used the pattern
of bone dents in Triceratops skulls to show that these iconic dinosaurs locked horns in combat.)
If the pachycephalosaur skulls were eroded naturally, they would have holes everywhere. Instead, two-thirds of the injuries are on the frontal bone on the roof of the skull—the area that would suffer the most impacts during head-on collisions. This strongly suggests that the animals were indeed ramming each other. “We can equivocate over how solid the case for head-butting is, but I’m pretty confident that the skulls weren’t just for looks,” says Farke.
Many pachycephalosaur species had these injuries, despite existing at
different times and having differently shaped domes, which suggests
that the entire group was a dynasty of head-butters. And only the
fully-domed specimens showed signs of damage. Skulls with flatter domes,
which Peterson thinks belonged to females or youngsters, were free of
injuries. This implies that, as in modern goats or cattle, only the
males charged each other.
In fact, Peterson found more support for the head-butting idea by looking at modern mammals. Goats, which usually hit each other in the sides, tend to have rib and spinal injuries. Bison, which lock heads and push, suffer a mix of head and spinal damage. But sheep, which do ram each other head-on, mainly suffer from head injuries much like those of pachycephalosaurs.
But there’s a slight flaw in this comparison—we don’t have many complete pachycephalosaur skeletons. Their skulls are easily found, but we cannot tell if they also sustained the same sort of rib and spinal injuries as bison or goats. “I’d really, really like to take a look at injuries in the rest of the body for pachycephalosaurs,” says Farke. “I’m not entirely convinced that head-to-head ramming definitely occurred in these animals, and wonder if they might have been primarily flank-butters.”
Horner is even less convinced. Based on his own analysis, he says that the dome’s internal structure and bone tissues were completely different to that of modern head-butting animals. “This suggests that pachycephalosaurs could only head butt once, and that trauma would have likely killed them,” he says.
Peterson acknowledges that the bone in the domes is unlike anything in living animals. “Simply put, the domes are just weird!” he says. However, he points to work from Eric Snively at Ohio University, who scanned several domes and put them through the same virtual crash-tests that engineers use on cars. The result: “these domes could withstand quite a wallop”.
He says that he and Horner have agreed to disagree. “At the end of the day, we will never know what pachycephalosaurs used their bizarre domes for because we obviously cannot directly observe their behaviour,” he says.
If the domes were truly rams, they could have been billboards too. After all, prominent weapons like antlers or horns also make inherently good ads for an individual’s strength and vigour. “I think that the idea of the domes being used as a display structure is very likely,” says Peterson. “A display structure is great for communicating about how tough animals are… but sometimes they have to back that up.”
Reference: Peterson, Dischler & Longrich (2013) Distributions of Cranial Pathologies Provide Evidence for Head-Butting in Dome-Headed Dinosaurs (Pachycephalosauridae). PLoS ONE 8(7): e68620. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0068620
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/19/butting-heads-over-skull-injuries-and-dinosaur-head-butts/
Joseph Peterson from the University of Wisconsin has used this principle to study the lifestyle of a group of dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs. The name comes from the Greek for “thick-headed lizards” and refers to the group’s most distinctive feature—a thick dome atop their skulls, usually fringed with small spikes. What was it for?
The most popular answer is that these dinosaurs used their skulls as battering rams, charging each other head-on to fight over mates, territories or both. The domes would have protected their brain during such collisions. But other dinosaur specialists, like Mark Goodwin and Jack Horner, have said that the dome was too brittle to be used as a ram. Instead, they think it was a billboard. The domes helped pachycephalosaurs to identify members of their own species; maybe they were even brightly coloured to patterned to attract the opposite sex.
The billboard idea, in turn, has its problems. Critics point out that the domes are much the same across different pachycephalosaur species, and change dramatically in shape as the animals grow up. They’re hardly not the best badges of identity.
Pachycephalosaurus skeletons. Credit: Kabacchi
Together with Collin Dischler and Nicholas Longrich, he spent five years studying the domes of 109 pachycephalosaurs from over 14 species, searching for irregularities. He found a lot, including fractures that had since healed, and thick, irregular surfaces that indicated past infection and inflammation. And to his surprise, 22 percent of the domes across 9 species showed signs of damage. “That’s much higher than we expected,” says Peterson.
Skull injuries on pachycephalosaur skull domes. Credit: Peterson et al. 2013. PLOS
If the pachycephalosaur skulls were eroded naturally, they would have holes everywhere. Instead, two-thirds of the injuries are on the frontal bone on the roof of the skull—the area that would suffer the most impacts during head-on collisions. This strongly suggests that the animals were indeed ramming each other. “We can equivocate over how solid the case for head-butting is, but I’m pretty confident that the skulls weren’t just for looks,” says Farke.
Possible pachycephalosaur combat moves. Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right A B to pull off a finisher. Credit: Ryan Steiskal
In fact, Peterson found more support for the head-butting idea by looking at modern mammals. Goats, which usually hit each other in the sides, tend to have rib and spinal injuries. Bison, which lock heads and push, suffer a mix of head and spinal damage. But sheep, which do ram each other head-on, mainly suffer from head injuries much like those of pachycephalosaurs.
But there’s a slight flaw in this comparison—we don’t have many complete pachycephalosaur skeletons. Their skulls are easily found, but we cannot tell if they also sustained the same sort of rib and spinal injuries as bison or goats. “I’d really, really like to take a look at injuries in the rest of the body for pachycephalosaurs,” says Farke. “I’m not entirely convinced that head-to-head ramming definitely occurred in these animals, and wonder if they might have been primarily flank-butters.”
Horner is even less convinced. Based on his own analysis, he says that the dome’s internal structure and bone tissues were completely different to that of modern head-butting animals. “This suggests that pachycephalosaurs could only head butt once, and that trauma would have likely killed them,” he says.
Peterson acknowledges that the bone in the domes is unlike anything in living animals. “Simply put, the domes are just weird!” he says. However, he points to work from Eric Snively at Ohio University, who scanned several domes and put them through the same virtual crash-tests that engineers use on cars. The result: “these domes could withstand quite a wallop”.
He says that he and Horner have agreed to disagree. “At the end of the day, we will never know what pachycephalosaurs used their bizarre domes for because we obviously cannot directly observe their behaviour,” he says.
If the domes were truly rams, they could have been billboards too. After all, prominent weapons like antlers or horns also make inherently good ads for an individual’s strength and vigour. “I think that the idea of the domes being used as a display structure is very likely,” says Peterson. “A display structure is great for communicating about how tough animals are… but sometimes they have to back that up.”
Reference: Peterson, Dischler & Longrich (2013) Distributions of Cranial Pathologies Provide Evidence for Head-Butting in Dome-Headed Dinosaurs (Pachycephalosauridae). PLoS ONE 8(7): e68620. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0068620
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/19/butting-heads-over-skull-injuries-and-dinosaur-head-butts/
Monday, July 15, 2013
Sarah Kay, Spoken Word Poetry: Peacocks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=PtMr7ntHcSY
Friday, July 12, 2013
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Brain Games Versus Nature Documentaries
Published April 15, 2013
It seems brain-training
games—online tests, quizzes, games, or flash cards designed to improve
attention, memory, creativity, and concentration—are everywhere. But do
they work? A recent study published in the journal PLoS ONE says … maybe not. (Learn about the brain.)
When researchers tested employees of the Australian
Taxation Office to see if brain games boosted their mental capabilities,
it turned out that workers who watched nature documentaries instead
fared better on tests measuring language skills (as well as quality of
life and self-esteem).
Cate Borness, a graduate researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney,Australia,
tested 135 Australian public-sector employees on their productivity,
stress, cognitive functions, and overall quality of life to get baseline
performance levels.
Then she and her colleagues randomly assigned them to
either a test group that underwent 16 weeks of short brain-training
sessions using Happy Neuron software, or a control group that spent 16
weeks watching short nature documentaries and answering brief questions
about them (to prove they'd watched the videos). The short clips were
taken from National Geographic’s video website.
Watch one of the documentaries, the Okavango Delta.
Members of the control group—the "active control"—were
assigned a task like watching the documentaries to ensure that any
benefits seen from the brain-training app weren't simply because the
control subjects were bored while the test subjects' brains were firing
on all cylinders.
Nature and Language
"We didn't find a huge impact in terms of the cognitive
training program," Borness said. But, oddly enough, the group that
watched the documentaries left the study with statistically significant
benefits.
The nature video group said that their stress had gone
down, their quality of life had increased, and—according to tests that
Borness and her colleagues gave both groups—their language skills had
improved. (Read “Beyond the Brain” in National Geographic magazine.)
That could be because the videos and short questionnaires
were language-based, Borness said. "You're listening to a video and then
answering questions about it."
The brain-training games, on the other hand, were designed
to improve multiple measures of intelligence and cognitive function;
only about 20 percent of the games emphasized language skills.
One such game involved users having to fit words into
boxes such that the last letter of a word was also the first letter of
another word. The language-game players did see a slight increase in
their language skills, but not nearly as much of an increase as the
video watchers.
In the paper, Borness speculates that this could be
because the games focused on language only a fifth of the time, with
other games dedicated to memory, attention, reasoning, and more. Yet
those games didn't produce any measurable effects in the test
population.
Brain games like these could still be useful for some
people, Borness said. "The product may be questionable in its efficacy,
[but] I think part of the problem is not doing enough of it to have an
effect." However, she added, "we haven't figured out what is 'enough.'"
Despite the results of the study, Borness says she herself
is still a user of brain-training games. "I think they're fun. I'm one
of those people who can't do nothing, so I get on my phone and play
games." (Check out National Geographic’s Brain Games.)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130410-brain-games-neuroscience-culture-science/
Improving 3-D Printing by Copying Nature
Published July 7, 2013
The public imagination has been captured by 3-D
printing in recent months, as people have used it to conjure up custom
medical devices, a working handgun,
and even an edible pizza. This spring, Staples became the first major
retailer to announce that it would carry 3-D printers, putting the
technology in the hands of the masses for about $1,300. (See "3-D Printers Are Saving Lives and Serving Pizzas.")
To Janine Benyus,
a biologist, author, and innovation consultant, the 3-D printer
revolution offers great opportunity, as well as risk. She hopes the
technology can be improved by modeling it after natural processes. (See "What, Exactly Is a 3-D Printer?")
"It's going to start slow—people will make toys for their
kids and so on," she predicts. But soon, people will be printing out
increasingly sophisticated products, from home goods to shoes.
Toxic Concerns
One big problem with 3-D printing in its current form, said
Benyus, is that many of the printers rely on toxic building materials,
in the form of an increasing array of polymers (plastics), resins, and
metal powders.
"Some 'makers' [3-D printer users] are starting to see
their skin reacting, and when you look at the material data safety
sheets for these materials you see serious warnings," said Benyus.
That's a concern, because people are using the printers in their homes
and inhaling the fumes, she said.
"We shouldn't have to wash our clothes after we use a 3-D
printer, or ask our sons or daughters to take out the hazardous waste
trash," she said.
Instead, Benyus argues that all the materials used in 3-D
printing should be common and safe for anyone to handle. They should be
sourced from local feedstocks, and at the end of their lives, they
should be "unzippable" into reusable materials.
Mirroring the Chemistry of Life
Benyus, who wrote Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature and co-founded the institute Biomimicry 3.8,
would like to see a transition in manufacturing—from big,
smoke-belching factories to small, clean desktop printers. The key to
making it truly sustainable, she said, lies in mimicking how a natural
ecosystem functions.
"Nature uses life-friendly chemistry, which is nontoxic and
water-based, and which does not require high heat," said Benyus. In
contrast, most of the products people use today have been forged in
industrial-size furnaces, with a plethora of toxic solvents. A potato
chip bag may seem like a simple item, but it is actually made up of
several thin layers of different materials, one to make it strong, one
to make it airtight, and so on.
But nature creates an enormous amount of diversity from a
relatively small palette of materials. Most of the polymers in the
natural world fall into about five classes, said Benyus. One is keratin,
which makes up skin, hair, and feathers across the animal kingdom.
Another is chitin, which makes up exoskeletons in arthropods. The way
such basic building blocks are arranged, in terms of internal structure,
results in extraordinary differences in animals' size, shape, color,
and function—and it can also result in extraordinary strength.
For example, an abalone shell is stronger than high-tech ceramics because of its internal structure, said Benyus. Diatom shells are made of silica (glass), but they are extremely strong because of their stress-distributing pattern of holes.
The tough, lightweight structure of abalone shells could inspire efficient 3-D prints.
Photograph by Darlyne A. Murawski, National Geographic
Like nature, 3-D printers can excel at building complex
structures from simple materials, said Benyus. Both use an additive
process, meaning larger pieces are built up from smaller ones.
In contrast, conventional industrial manufacturing is
typically subtractive: Pieces are cut out of rolls of prefashioned
material, or extracted from natural resources like ore or timber. The
problem with that approach is it creates a lot of waste. A leaf isn't
cut out of a roll of green stuff.
Strides are already being made toward greener 3-D printing, as some of the printers use a corn-based polymer called polylactic acid (PLA). That's a start, said Benyus, but there's still a long way to go.
"PLA is biodegradable, but I wouldn't want us growing
genetically engineered corn, with huge inputs of fossil fuels and
fertilizers, to grow plastics. That's the old industrial model," she
said. "I would rather have us use waste streams, ideally locally sourced
ones, or become more plantlike and use excess carbon dioxide to make
polymers, instead of asking plants to make them for us."
Benyus said scientists at the University of California,
Berkeley, are looking at using waste sawdust in 3-D printers. Other
ideas include using chicken feathers or waste from seafood processing.
She pointed to a company called Novomer, which is working on making polycarbonates from smokestack emissions catalyzed by citrus oil.
To Benyus, the end of a printed product's life cycle is
also critical. "Let's build an ecosystem of companies that take back the
products," she said. "If they are biologically sourced get them back to
the soil; if they are technically sourced get them back to the
printer."
Taking the products apart should be easy, she said, given
the way nature has bacteria and enzymes ready to devour or deconstruct
anything that stops moving.
Challenging Chemistry
Markus J. Buehler,
a professor and head of the department of civil and environmental
engineering at MIT, told National Geographic that the idea of using
biomimicry to inform 3-D printing design is "very positive, and may be
critical to advance the technology to the next level." He said it could
eventually lead to higher efficiency and lower prices, as well as lower
environmental impact.
Buehler said it would be great to use natural, safe
materials to build things, the way a tree grows or a spider produces
silk. But the problem is that "we don't really understand how to do
that." He said a lot of biology and chemistry needs to be worked out in
order to produce our own materials from these simple building blocks,
but progress is being made.
"We are in a time when these two technologies are emerging,
when we now have 3-D printers that can print with microscale resolution
to create objects with virtually any pattern and any shape," he noted.
Meanwhile, "scientists are starting to understand how nature makes
things at the smaller scales, based on the self-assembly of molecules
like proteins or sugars to create functional materials."
Nanotechnology will take that to the next level, and will soon show up in 3-D printers, he predicts.
Democratizing Production
To Benyus, one of the lessons of biomimicry is the model of
distributed growth and production. "An oak tree makes lots of leaves to
catch the sun, not one big leaf," she said.
With 3-D printing, everyone can become their own
manufacturer. They'll be able to make small items at home, and if they
need something larger or more complicated, they could use the
neighborhood printer, or maybe one at a local store. "Designs will
crisscross the globe, instead of products," said Benyus, and this would
obviously produce savings in both shipping costs and associated
emissions.
But she also ponders the potential downsides: What happens
to consumption patterns if we can make whatever we want, whenever we
want? Will we throw more things away or fewer, because we had a hand in
their manufacture?
The next step is opening a dialogue with the design
community, engineers, entrepreneurs, and the public, said Benyus. She
will also be conducting research and working on a library of biomimetic
functions that anyone can utilize.
"We have an opportunity to reshape this new manufacturing revolution in another image," she said.
3-D Printers Are Saving Lives and Serving Pizzas
Published May 24, 2013
The marvels of 3-D printing are continuing to make headlines this month.
Biomedical engineers at the University of Michigan have revealed how they used 3-D printing technology to fashion a tiny, custom-made implant that helped save the life of a newborn baby boy.
And the Texas-based engineering firm Systems and Materials Research Corporation has just received a $125,000 grant from NASA to develop a printer that can fabricate pizzas for astronauts to eat in space—not unlike the food "replicator" in Star Trek.
Saving Kaiba
Six-week-old Kaiba Gionfriddo was born with a condition that caused the airways in one of his lungs to collapse regularly; the infant had to be resuscitated on a daily basis. Working with his doctors, researchers used a CT scan of his airways to design a sort of tracheal "splint" that would be able to support the lining of his bronchial tube for two or three years until his body grows stronger and he no longer requires the artificial assistance.
Using a sophisticated 3-D printer, and the CT scan as their blueprint, the team printed up a flexible tube out of biopolymer that was perfectly sized to Kaiba's tiny air passages. They implanted it in February 2012. Sixteen months later Kaiba and his parents are breathing easy, with no more emergency resuscitations or brushes with death.
Heavenly Pizza
Down in Texas plans are afoot to make pizzas for NASA that will be literally out of this world. The idea is to be able to create nutritious meals on long interplanetary missions.
"The current food system is not adequate in nutrition or acceptability through the five-year shelf life required for a mission to Mars," said NASA spokesperson Dave Steitz. At present, astronauts dine on pre-packaged meals not unlike the meals-ready-to-eat (MREs) issued to the military. MREs require a lot of processing and over time lose their nutritional value.
Enter the 3-D food printer. By following digital recipes and using easily stored bulk ingredients—powdered carbohydrates, powdered proteins, and oils—deep-space travelers will be able to print out hot, fresh onboard meals. In theory anyway, these foods will not only be wholesome and tasty, but also tailored to meet the precise nutritional needs and personal tastes of each extraterrestrial diner.
Pizza won't be the only item on the printed menu. The humble pizza is being used as a starting point because its layered structure makes it an ideal candidate for 3-D food-printing technology, which "prints" objects by depositing one microscopically thin layer at a time—and in the case of pizzas, baking them as they go.
Printing Dinner
Creating the meals will require a blend of printing technologies: 3-D printing to build up the bulk of the meal, and inkjet printing to add vitamins, flavors, and aromas. The end results might not win any Michelin stars, but they should be satisfying enough to keep capsule-bound astronauts well-fed on a multiyear mission to Mars.
Printing meals from generic bulk-stored ingredients such as powdered carbohydrates and proteins has implications far beyond the confines of a Mars-bound space capsule, according to the company behind the proposal, and could be used to help solve potential food crises as the planet's population continues to grow. The 3-D printing process reduces waste to nearly zero, and underutilized foods such as insects and algae can be dried and powdered and used to supply some of the ingredients.
These latest innovations and breakthroughs brighten the spotlight that has been thrown on the fast-evolving 3-D printing industry lately, starting with the headline-grabbing announcement that a University of Texas law student had printed a functioning .38-caliber handgun out of $60 worth of plastic.
Biomedical engineers at the University of Michigan have revealed how they used 3-D printing technology to fashion a tiny, custom-made implant that helped save the life of a newborn baby boy.
And the Texas-based engineering firm Systems and Materials Research Corporation has just received a $125,000 grant from NASA to develop a printer that can fabricate pizzas for astronauts to eat in space—not unlike the food "replicator" in Star Trek.
Saving Kaiba
Six-week-old Kaiba Gionfriddo was born with a condition that caused the airways in one of his lungs to collapse regularly; the infant had to be resuscitated on a daily basis. Working with his doctors, researchers used a CT scan of his airways to design a sort of tracheal "splint" that would be able to support the lining of his bronchial tube for two or three years until his body grows stronger and he no longer requires the artificial assistance.
Using a sophisticated 3-D printer, and the CT scan as their blueprint, the team printed up a flexible tube out of biopolymer that was perfectly sized to Kaiba's tiny air passages. They implanted it in February 2012. Sixteen months later Kaiba and his parents are breathing easy, with no more emergency resuscitations or brushes with death.
Heavenly Pizza
Down in Texas plans are afoot to make pizzas for NASA that will be literally out of this world. The idea is to be able to create nutritious meals on long interplanetary missions.
"The current food system is not adequate in nutrition or acceptability through the five-year shelf life required for a mission to Mars," said NASA spokesperson Dave Steitz. At present, astronauts dine on pre-packaged meals not unlike the meals-ready-to-eat (MREs) issued to the military. MREs require a lot of processing and over time lose their nutritional value.
Enter the 3-D food printer. By following digital recipes and using easily stored bulk ingredients—powdered carbohydrates, powdered proteins, and oils—deep-space travelers will be able to print out hot, fresh onboard meals. In theory anyway, these foods will not only be wholesome and tasty, but also tailored to meet the precise nutritional needs and personal tastes of each extraterrestrial diner.
Pizza won't be the only item on the printed menu. The humble pizza is being used as a starting point because its layered structure makes it an ideal candidate for 3-D food-printing technology, which "prints" objects by depositing one microscopically thin layer at a time—and in the case of pizzas, baking them as they go.
Printing Dinner
Creating the meals will require a blend of printing technologies: 3-D printing to build up the bulk of the meal, and inkjet printing to add vitamins, flavors, and aromas. The end results might not win any Michelin stars, but they should be satisfying enough to keep capsule-bound astronauts well-fed on a multiyear mission to Mars.
Printing meals from generic bulk-stored ingredients such as powdered carbohydrates and proteins has implications far beyond the confines of a Mars-bound space capsule, according to the company behind the proposal, and could be used to help solve potential food crises as the planet's population continues to grow. The 3-D printing process reduces waste to nearly zero, and underutilized foods such as insects and algae can be dried and powdered and used to supply some of the ingredients.
These latest innovations and breakthroughs brighten the spotlight that has been thrown on the fast-evolving 3-D printing industry lately, starting with the headline-grabbing announcement that a University of Texas law student had printed a functioning .38-caliber handgun out of $60 worth of plastic.
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Spiders' Electrostatic Charge Helps Them Trap Prey In Their Webs, New Study Shows
By: Tia Ghose
Spiders may trap unsuspecting prey by sucking them in using electrostatic attraction, new research suggests.
The new study, published today (July 4) in the journal Scientific Reports, found that the spiderweb of the common cross spider (or garden spider) is attracted to electrically charged objects, with the sticky threads of spider silk arcing toward each other in response to a charged object.
Stroke of inspiration
Some flying insects, as they flap their wings, for instance, generate an electric charge. As such the new results suggest that charged bugs such as honeybees could be sucked into, and then trapped by, a spider's sticky web as they fly by. [Ewww! Photos of Bat-Eating Spiders]
"Charged insects can produce a deformation of a spiderweb," said study co-author Victor Ortega-Jimenez, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Any insect that is flying very close to the spiderweb can be trapped by the electrostatic effect."
Ortega-Jimenez noticed this phenomenon while playing with a simple toy with his daughter: an electrostatically charged "magic wand" that can cause objects such as paper to levitate. While doing so, they decided to charge up a few insects and even brought it near a spiderweb that was nearby, which deformed in response to the magic wand
He also knew that honeybees generate an electric charge of up to 200 volts as they flap their wings, which may help them pick up pollen from negatively charged flowers. Several studies have revealed that spiderwebs can dramatically deform in response to prey. So he wondered whether spiderwebs could use electrostatic attraction to lure prey.
Charging webs
To find out, Ortega-Jimenez and his colleague Robert Dudley gathered spiderwebs of the cross spider (Araneus diadematus) from around the UC Berkeley campus. Back at the lab, they studied how the spiderwebs responded to electrically charged objects.
They found that the web and positively charged objects were attracted to one another. What's more, the silk threads of the spiderweb curved toward each other underneath a charged honeybee that was falling toward it, making it likelier that the hapless insect would get entangled in the deadly web. The deformation was nearly half the length of the insects, a fairly big change. [See Video of Charged Spiderwebs]
"This is quite intriguing," said Markus Buehler, a materials scientist
who studies spider silk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
who was not involved in the study. "This attraction pulls the insect to
the web and enhances the likelihood that it is being caught in the web."
But it's not clear how often this strange effect plays out in nature. Cross spiders mostly dine on flies, not bees, and so far, no one has tested whether flies have an electric charge. The bigger question, Buehler said, is how many insects are electrically charged.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/spiders-electrostatic-charge-trap-prey-webs_n_3550253.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
Spiders may trap unsuspecting prey by sucking them in using electrostatic attraction, new research suggests.
The new study, published today (July 4) in the journal Scientific Reports, found that the spiderweb of the common cross spider (or garden spider) is attracted to electrically charged objects, with the sticky threads of spider silk arcing toward each other in response to a charged object.
Stroke of inspiration
Some flying insects, as they flap their wings, for instance, generate an electric charge. As such the new results suggest that charged bugs such as honeybees could be sucked into, and then trapped by, a spider's sticky web as they fly by. [Ewww! Photos of Bat-Eating Spiders]
"Charged insects can produce a deformation of a spiderweb," said study co-author Victor Ortega-Jimenez, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Any insect that is flying very close to the spiderweb can be trapped by the electrostatic effect."
Ortega-Jimenez noticed this phenomenon while playing with a simple toy with his daughter: an electrostatically charged "magic wand" that can cause objects such as paper to levitate. While doing so, they decided to charge up a few insects and even brought it near a spiderweb that was nearby, which deformed in response to the magic wand
He also knew that honeybees generate an electric charge of up to 200 volts as they flap their wings, which may help them pick up pollen from negatively charged flowers. Several studies have revealed that spiderwebs can dramatically deform in response to prey. So he wondered whether spiderwebs could use electrostatic attraction to lure prey.
Charging webs
To find out, Ortega-Jimenez and his colleague Robert Dudley gathered spiderwebs of the cross spider (Araneus diadematus) from around the UC Berkeley campus. Back at the lab, they studied how the spiderwebs responded to electrically charged objects.
They found that the web and positively charged objects were attracted to one another. What's more, the silk threads of the spiderweb curved toward each other underneath a charged honeybee that was falling toward it, making it likelier that the hapless insect would get entangled in the deadly web. The deformation was nearly half the length of the insects, a fairly big change. [See Video of Charged Spiderwebs]
But it's not clear how often this strange effect plays out in nature. Cross spiders mostly dine on flies, not bees, and so far, no one has tested whether flies have an electric charge. The bigger question, Buehler said, is how many insects are electrically charged.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/spiders-electrostatic-charge-trap-prey-webs_n_3550253.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
Friday, July 5, 2013
Can Purported Mammoth Blood Revive Extinct Species?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130601-woolly-mammoth-blood-russia-science-extinct-species-deextinction/
Night Parrot, Nocturnal Bird In Australia, Seen Alive For First Time In Over A Century
By Thuy Ong
SYDNEY, July 5 (Reuters) - A nocturnal Australian parrot that hops like a kangaroo and had not been seen alive for more than a century has not only been seen but has been photographed, a naturalist said on Friday, but he is keeping the whereabouts a secret.
Scientists had previously based their knowledge of the critically endangered Night Parrot, a ground-dwelling bird, on the occasional dead specimen and recordings of its call - which is rare enough.
"I've only heard them in one place and I've been in a hundred places," said John Young, a naturalist and documentary film maker who has consulted with Australian wildlife services.
"The strangest thing about this parrot, living on the ground, it hops like a little kangaroo."
Young's alleged sighting on May 25 in the northern state of Queensland was the culmination of a 15-year quest. He told Reuters that he lured the shy, palm-sized bird out with a recorded parrot call.
"I couldn't get over it," he said.
The Night Parrot is small with yellowish green plumage, mottled with brown and black specks. It hides in spinefex grass during the day and is active at night.
In 2012, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the bird as critically endangered, its population depleted by feral cats, foxes and changes in the environment after European settlement in Australia.
With no firm estimates about how many of the birds exist in the wild, Young refused to reveal where he found the parrot.
"I think the worst thing we can do at the moment is to let too many people anywhere near it," said Young. "In the time I had with the bird the other night, it is the most sensitive bird I have ever seen."
Leo Joseph, the director and research leader of the wildlife collection at government research body CSIRO, supported Young.
"The sooner we can learn how to look for them and find them elsewhere the better," Joseph told Reuters. "For now, keeping the locality a secret is the way to go." (Reporting by Thuy Ong; Editing by Elaine Lies)
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/05/night-parrot-australia_n_3548811.html?ir=Green
SYDNEY, July 5 (Reuters) - A nocturnal Australian parrot that hops like a kangaroo and had not been seen alive for more than a century has not only been seen but has been photographed, a naturalist said on Friday, but he is keeping the whereabouts a secret.
Scientists had previously based their knowledge of the critically endangered Night Parrot, a ground-dwelling bird, on the occasional dead specimen and recordings of its call - which is rare enough.
"I've only heard them in one place and I've been in a hundred places," said John Young, a naturalist and documentary film maker who has consulted with Australian wildlife services.
"The strangest thing about this parrot, living on the ground, it hops like a little kangaroo."
Young's alleged sighting on May 25 in the northern state of Queensland was the culmination of a 15-year quest. He told Reuters that he lured the shy, palm-sized bird out with a recorded parrot call.
"I couldn't get over it," he said.
The Night Parrot is small with yellowish green plumage, mottled with brown and black specks. It hides in spinefex grass during the day and is active at night.
In 2012, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the bird as critically endangered, its population depleted by feral cats, foxes and changes in the environment after European settlement in Australia.
With no firm estimates about how many of the birds exist in the wild, Young refused to reveal where he found the parrot.
"I think the worst thing we can do at the moment is to let too many people anywhere near it," said Young. "In the time I had with the bird the other night, it is the most sensitive bird I have ever seen."
Leo Joseph, the director and research leader of the wildlife collection at government research body CSIRO, supported Young.
"The sooner we can learn how to look for them and find them elsewhere the better," Joseph told Reuters. "For now, keeping the locality a secret is the way to go." (Reporting by Thuy Ong; Editing by Elaine Lies)
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/05/night-parrot-australia_n_3548811.html?ir=Green
Monday, July 1, 2013
A Beautiful Notion
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/07/01/197657146/a-beautiful-notion-that-caterpillars-killed-off-the-dinosaurs