How does nature make durable materials like corals without heat or a kiln? How do peacock feathers get their beautiful colors? And how do geckos stick to all kinds of surfaces, allowing them to run up ...

Can a building behave like a forest—by generating its own energy, absorbing naturally available water, and producing no waste? This was one of the prompts behind the design of the Bullitt Center, a ...

Our biomimicry challenge What Would You Ask Nature? assigned three challenges, and teams are now reporting their bio-inspired solutions. After having a discussion with IBM, and walking through some ...

Designers and engineers have often looked to the environment and how Mother Nature has accomplished phenomenal design solutions for inspiration over the ages. Perhaps all that is new about this ...

Biomedical engineers often turn to nature for inspiration, a method known as biomimicry. In her presentation at the recent BIOMEDigital conference, Donna Bibber shared a few examples of how biomimicry ...

Da Vinci was definitely on to something when he observed birds and copied their forms to create his own wings for flight. Although biomimicry wasn’t ultimately successful in helping Da Vinci achieve ...

Birds do it. Bees do it. And now, increasingly, aircraft engineers are falling in love with the idea of studying the natural world to find solutions that can be adapted and applied to the design of ...

People have been turning to nature for inspiration to help them solve problems for millions of years. From buildings and bridges to materials and medicine – examining the design of nature has aided in ...

Zoom in to the inner world of your veins, arteries and capillaries, and you'll find an engineering marvel: the red blood cell. Disc-shaped and flexible, millions of these oxygen transporters can be ...