by Even as man-made climate change threatens the environment, nature continues to fuel our technological progress.
“The solutions provided by nature have evolved over billions of years and have been tested over and over every day since the beginning of time,” said Evripidis Gkanias, a University of Edinburgh researcher.
Gkanias is particularly interested in how nature can educate artificial intelligence.
“Human creativity may be interesting, but it cannot achieve the robustness of nature – and engineers know that,” he told AFP.
From compasses that mimic insect eyes and forest firefighting robots that behave like vines, here’s a selection of this year’s nature-based technology.
– Insect compass –
Some insects – such as ants and bees – perform visual navigation based on the intensity and polarization of sunlight, thereby using the position of the sun as a reference point.
Researchers replicated their eye structure to build a compass that could estimate the sun’s position in the sky, even on cloudy days.
Common compasses rely on the Earth’s weak magnetic field for navigation, which is easily disturbed by noise from electronics.
A prototype of the light-sensing compass is “already working great”, said Gkanias, who led the study published in Communications Engineering.
“With appropriate funding, this could easily be transformed into a more compact and lighter product”, he said.
And with a little more tweaking, the insect compass could work on any planet where a large celestial light source is visible.
– Water collection network –
A fabric inspired by the silk threads of a spider’s web and able to collect drinking water from the morning fog could play an important role in regions suffering from water scarcity.
The artificial threads pull from the feather spider, whose complex “spindle knots” allow large droplets of water to move and collect on their web.
Once the material can be mass-produced, the harvested water could reach a “significant scale for real application”, said Yongmei Zheng, co-author of the study published in Advanced Functional Materials, by AFP.
– Fire fighting vines –
Animals are not the only source of inspiration from nature.
Scientists have created an inflatable robot that “grows” towards light or heat, in the same way vines creep up a wall or across a forest floor.
The approximately two meter long tubular robot can steer itself using fluid filled pouches rather than expensive electronics.
Over time, these robots could find hot spots and deliver fire suppression agents, say researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“These robots are slow, but that’s enough to fight smoldering fires, like peat fires, which can be a big source of carbon emissions,” co-author Charles Xiao told AFP .
But before the robots can climb the terrain, they need to be more heat-resistant and agile.
– Kombucha Circuits –
Scientists at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England in Bristol have found a way to use slimy kombucha mats — produced by yeast and bacteria during the fermentation of the popular tea-based drink — to create “kombucha electronics.” .
The scientists printed electrical circuits on drying mats that could illuminate small LED lights.
Dry kombucha mats share the properties of textiles or even leather. But they are sustainable and biodegradable, and can even be submerged in water for days without being destroyed, the authors said.
“Kombucha wearables may have sensors and electronics in the material itself, providing a seamless and unobtrusive integration of technology with the human body,” for example for heart monitors or step trackers, said lead author Andrew Adamatzky. and director of the laboratory, with AFP.
The mats are lighter, cheaper and more flexible than plastic, but the authors warn that durability and mass production remain significant hurdles.
– Scaly robots –
Pangolins look like a cross between a pine cone and an anteater. The soft mammals, covered in reptilian scales, are known to curl up into a ball to protect themselves from predators.
Now, a tiny robot could adapt that same design for potentially life-saving work, according to a study published in Nature Communications.
It is intended to roll through our digestive tract before releasing and delivering medicine or stopping internal bleeding in hard-to-reach parts of the human body.
Lead author Ren Hao Soon of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems was watching a YouTube video when he “walked across the animal and saw that it was a good fit”.
Soon there was a need for a soft material that would not cause harm inside the human body, and the advantages of a hard material that could, for example, conduct electricity. The Pangolin’s unique structure was perfect.
The little robots are still in their early stages, but could be made for as little as 10 euros each.
“It is natural to look to nature to solve these types of problems,” said Soon.
“Each individual design part of an animal serves a specific function. It’s very elegant.”
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