Biomimicry Knowledge Base

Created for [insert class name] at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture, Winter 2003.

Biomimicry -- sometimes called Bionics or Biomimetics -- is a scientific and technical discipline finding inspiration in biological systems to define new engineering solutions. It is a multi-disciplinary subject involving a wide diversity of other domains like electronics, informatics, medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and many others. ESA

Matt Fulvio, Course Instructor
Jeff Johnston, Research Support

(Note: The bibliography below is a work in progress. You'll find lots of dead links below as I'm still in the process of cleaning them up. - Jeff)

Articles

(Note: Many articles listed below require a subscription to access.)

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Look closely enough at the arms of the brittlestar, a starfish relative, and you'd see that those arms are looking right back at you. Each one is coated with perfect lenses that focus light onto a nerve bundle, researchers report in the Aug. 23 Nature . Made of skeletal material, these lens structures rival recent engineering advances in microlens arrays.
C. Schubert
Science News
August 25, 2001
A new bandage that imitates nature's own healing process could replace traditional gauze and elastic bandages within a few years, researchers said Monday.
United Press International
Technology Review
February 11, 2003
Artificially natural
 Nature has already found many ingenious solutions to problems that materials science has yet to overcome. So following nature's lead is not such a bad idea: directed assembly of proteins on a graphite surface might lead to hard biomimetic materials.
Ed Gerstner
Nature Materials Update
June 6, 2002
Natural selection has created many species in which individual survival rests on computations performed by the organism's own physiology.
Mark J. Schnitzer
Nature
April 18, 2002
Researchers are figuring out the chemistry behind natural adhesives -- useful dat for developing synthetic glues
Elizabeth Pennisi
Science
April 12, 2002
According to the new director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, biology will soon bring us materials like nothing we’ve seen.
Interview by David Cameron
Technology Review
February 8, 2002
Forget two-legged bots — forget androids altogether. Bio-guru Robert Full has seen the future of robotics, and it's one part cockroach, one part millipede, one part Internet.
Tom McNichol
WIRED
November 2002
The study of biomineralization has influenced a new generation of scientists interested in controlling materials synthesis at both the molecular and macroscopic levels. The understanding that organic macromolecules can facilitate all aspects of the mineral growth and that their incorporation into the material leads to enhanced purity and crystallinity (4), as well as increased mechanical strength, will catalyze new enthusiasm for biomimetic approaches to materials fabrication.
Trevor Douglas
Science
February 21, 2003
Membranes that get fatter when they are stretched are considered counterintuitive, but may be more common than we think. They might even turn up in human tissue.
Roderic Lakes
Nature
November 29, 2001
Thermal motion combined with input energy gives rise to a channeling of chance that can be used to exercise control over microscopic systems.
R. Dean Astumian and Peter Hänggi
Physics Today
November 2002
Unearthly aircraft may explore the Red Planet—and beyond.
Peter Weiss
Science News
May 25, 2002
Human technology may be taking a backseat to nature in the detection of crop disease.
Oliver Baker
Technology Review
October 10, 2001
Seals may not be the only animals that follow hydrodynamic trails to hunt in murky waters. "Only the toothed whales such as dolphins and sperm whales have sonar systems," Dehnhardt points out. "And it's interesting that all the other [marine mammals] have well-developed whiskers." Far from simply being vestigial hairs, whiskers may ultimately prove to be the eyes of the ocean.
Carl Zimmer
Science
July 6, 2001
Just as material science studies the structures of plants, animals, and natural forces to mimic their composition and form in the production of new materials, "genetic architecture" generates graphic and structural extrapolations to architectural design by studying and mimicking life forms (biomimetics).
Dennis L. Dollens and Ignasi Pérez Arnal
Architecture Week
June 19, 2002
Spinning complex webs of incredible strength, the versatile spider makes things sticky for unsuspecting prey.
Richard Conniff
National Geographic
August 2001

Gian Carlo Magnoli, Leonardo Amerigo Bonanni, Rania Khalaf, and Michael Fox
MIT Media Lab
July 2001
A review of DIGITAL BIOLOGY, How Nature Is Transforming Our Technology and Our Lives, by Peter J. Bentley.
Carl Zimmer
The New York Times
March 10, 2002

Jim Robbins
The New York Times
December 11, 2001

P. Weiss
Science News
December 8, 2001
Micro aircraft could serve many purposes, from exploring space to espionage. The laws of aerodynamics are a big obstacle for designers.
Peter Pae
The Los Angeles Times
June 14, 2002
Future of Medicine, The
 How the age of ecological medincine will keep you healthier.

Utne Reader
June 2001
By envisioning ant colonies as computer networks, entomologists have begun to unravel complex behavioral patterns.
Ben Shouse
Science
March 29, 2002
Before Darwin, most biologists adhered to a platonic model of nature. This implied that the biological realm consisted of a finite set of essentially immutable natural forms that, like inorganic forms such as atoms or crystals, are an intrinsic part of the eternal order of the world. Just as, today, we account for the form of atoms and crystals by a set of physical laws or 'constructional rules', so pre-darwinian biologists sought to account for the origin of biological forms in terms of a set of generative physical laws often referred to as the 'laws of form'
Michael Denton and Craig Marshall
Nature
March 22, 2001
So long as it avoids a Panglossian view of nature, the science of biomimetics has the potential to enrich many areas of technology. But accurate mimicry will require greater understanding of natural mechanisms at the molecular scale. As this continues to unfold, emulation may increasingly give way to assimilation of biological machinery.
Philip Ball
Nature
January 18, 2001
Spider silk has outstanding mechanical properties despite being spun at close to ambient temperatures and pressures using water as the solvent. The spider achieves this feat of benign fibre processing by judiciously controlling the folding and crystallization of the main protein constituents, and by adding auxiliary compounds, to create a composite material of defined hierarchical structure. Because the 'spinning dope' (the material from which silk is spun) is liquid crystalline, spiders can draw it during extrusion into a hardened fibre using minimal forces. This process involves an unusual internal drawdown within the spider's spinneret that is not seen in industrial fibre processing, followed by a conventional external drawdown after the dope has left the spinneret. Successful copying of the spider's internal processing and precise control over protein folding, combined with knowledge of the gene sequences of its spinning dopes, could permit industrial production of silk-based fibres with unique properties under benign conditions.

Nature
March 29, 2001
Mimicking Mother Nature
 Marrying art and science, Nekton Research has developed an underwater robot inspired by a one-cell organism.
Julie Wakefield
Scientific American
January 2002
Representations of cellular processes that can be used to compute their future behaviour would be of general scientific and practical value. But past attempts to construct such representations have been disappointing. This is now changing. Increases in biological understanding combined with advances in computational methods and in computer power make it possible to foresee construction of useful and predictive simulations of cellular processes.
Drew Endy and Roger Brent
Nature
January 18, 2001
Imitating nature is the sincerest form of flattery.
Richard Martin
Forbes.com
October 7, 2002
For the first time, scientists have created a material that closely mimics bone, opening the door to a synthetic bone replacement. The potential is even broader: Because the chemistry of the self-assembling molecules is easy to change, researchers now have a strategy for forming a wide array of organic-inorganic fibers
Robert F. Service
ScienceNOW
November 26, 2001
Understanding how insect feet adhere to slippery, wet surfaces has been a centuries-long quest.
Leslie Pray
The Scientist
June 24, 2002
Scientists are re-creating our world in the realm of the intensely tiny. The potential payoff: denser hard drives, smaller chips, better medicine.Scientists are re-creating our world in the realm of the intensely tiny. The potential payoff: denser hard drives, smaller chips, better medicine.
Elizabeth Corcoran
Forbes.com
July 23, 2001
DNA brings carbon nanotube circuits in line
A. Goho
Science News
November 22, 2003
Striving for designer substances that build themselves from individual molecules.
Jessica Gorman
Science News
December 2, 2002

Robert Carlson
IEEE Spectrum
May 10, 2001

David Cohen
New Scientist
April 4, 2002
Using a space-age device called a bioreactor, researchers have grown patches of tissue that beat and respond much like a human heart does.
February 14, 2002
Science@NASA
February 14, 2002

Hans Frauenfelder
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
February 19, 2002

Tom Sigfried
Dallas Morning News
October 28, 2002
Can we now build artificial animals? A combination of robot technology and neuroethological knowledge is enabling the development of realistic physical models of biological systems. And such systems are not only of interest to engineers. By exploring identified neural control circuits in the appropriate functional and environmental context, new insights are also provided to biologists.
Barbara Webb
Nature
May 16, 2002
Autonomous underwater vehicles enter the commercial mainstream.
Jennifer Ouellette
The Industrial Physicist
August/September 2002
Opals do it, even biomolecules do it, so why can't self-assembly be harnessed to create photonic crystals with near-perfect order? A new technique shows that absolute order may not require absolute control.
John D. Joannopoulos
Nature
November 15, 2001
A primitive marine creature has natural-glass fibers that hint at high tech.
Peter Weiss
Science News
August 4, 20001
Researchers are considering trees, microbes, and the oceans as mega cleaning tools.
A. J. S. Rayl
The Scientist
April 7, 2003

Ricki Lewis
The Scientist
February 4, 2002
Delicate threads of spider's silk are about to solve a major problem in photonics: how to make hollow optical fibres narrow enough to carry light beams around the fastest nanoscale optical circuits.
Danny Penman
New Scientist
March 19, 2003


Nature
March 29, 2001
The glass sponge research could yield practical results within ten years, said Sundar. The work appeared in the August 21, 2003 issue of Nature.

Technology Review
September 3, 2003
Sensory systems use a variety of membrane-bound receptors, including responsive ion channels, to discriminate between a multitude of stimuli. Here we describe how engineered membrane pores can be used to make rapid and sensitive biosensors with potential applications that range from the detection of biological warfare agents to pharmaceutical screening. Notably, use of the engineered pores in stochastic sensing, a single-molecule detection technology, reveals the identity of an analyte as well as its concentration.
Hagen Bayley and Paul S. Cremer
Nature
September 13, 2001
Advances in directed evolution and membrane biophysics make the synthesis of simple living cells, if not yet foreseeable reality, an imaginable goal. Overcoming the many scientific challenges along the way will deepen our understanding of the essence of cellular life and its origin on Earth.
Jack W. Szostak, David P. Bartel and Luigi Luisi
Nature
January 18, 2001
The mechanical properties of natural substances such as bone and shell are envied by those involved in the fabrication of materials. A 'bricks-and-mortar' structure, assembled layer by layer, is the key to making sea shells.
Michael Rubner
Nature
June 26, 2003

Chee Pearlman
The New York Times
April 4, 2002
Unraveling the Genome
 Eugene Chan’s dream was to build a machine that could read human DNA as quickly and cheaply as possible. His solution: mimic Mother Nature
David Noonan
Newsweek
June 24, 2002
Science’s unpredictability has not prevented a group of invited scientists from being farsighted about future possibilities in fundamental research and its applications.
Philip Campbell
Nature
January 18, 2001
This insect has a tailor-made covering for collecting water from early-morning fog.
Andrew R. Parker and Chris R. Lawrence
Nature
November 1, 2001
In living organisms, enzymes called hydrogenases harness plentiful metals to turn water into hydrogen and vice versa. Stripped of their proteins, they may show chemists a surprising shortcut to producing the fuel of the future
Joe Alper
Science
March 14, 2003

James Randerson
New Scientist
November 28, 2001
The main issue is that current building practices use ancient technology and materials to make dwellings. These dwellings depend on gravity for support. When the Earth moves under them, the inertia of the dwelling causes it to tear itself apart. There is dwelling technology available to stop this inane problem, but the general public, including research and education institutions, is either unaware of it or is avoiding it.
Jay Salsburg
Sustainable CommUnity
January 15, 2003

Books

     
     
     
     
     

 

Web Resources

http://www.biomat.net/ Biomaterials Network
http://www.biophysics.org/btol/ Biophysics Textbook Online
http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/ACT_Web/Subjects/Bio/bio_main.htm ESA - Biomimicry Main
A great resource for a wide variety of biomimetic information.
   
   
   
   

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