Quotes About Biomimicry

Nature works with five polymers. Only five polymers. In the natural world, life builds from the bottom up, and it builds in resilience and multiple uses.

What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked, 'How would nature solve this?'

Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?

Biomimicry is … the conscious emulation of life's genius.

Per capita, I would say that Australia has more biomimetic projects going than many other countries I've been to.

Biologically inspired materials could revolutionize materials science. People looking at spider silk and abalone shells are looking for new ways to make materials better, cheaper, and with less toxic byproducts.

Trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress. This algorithm has been put into a software program that's now being used to make bridges lightweight, to make building beams lightweight.

In the lab, we're discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.

Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that's already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn.

There are three types of biomimicry - one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem's level, like building a nature-inspired city.

Everyone is trying to jump on the biomimic bandwagon. But a cork floor is not biomimicry. Neither is using bacteria to clean water.

I see a future in which nature gives us a helping hand. Instead of destroying the natural world, why can't we use it to solve the kinds of problems that we are facing?

There are literally as many ideas as there are organisms.

Elsewhere the quest for a robotic lobster had taken a more sinister turn. The U.S. Navy was now considering plans for a beachhead assault that would begin with thousands of biomimetic lobsters dropped offshore from low-flying aircraft. Clambering over rocks and sniffing their way through currents toward shore, the lobster robots would search out mines and blow themselves up on command. Soon the Pentagon was funding robotic-lobster research to the tune of several million dollars.

For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.

If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use.

At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people.