“Learn from nature and there you will find your future”: like Leonardo da Vinci, creator of a flying machine that reproduces the flight of birds, many scientists and engineers continue to draw inspiration from nature to fuel technological innovations.
“Human creativity may be fascinating, but it cannot match the robustness of nature,” says Evripidis Gkanias, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh.
Like this scientist, who studies how artificial intelligence can be enhanced by living beings, many of the technological advances developed in 2023 are directly inspired by solutions already found in nature.
Compass insects
Some insects, such as ants and bees, orient themselves based on the intensity of light, using the position of the sun as a reference point.
Researchers have reproduced the structure of their eyes to build a new type of compass, which, unlike traditional models based on the Earth’s magnetic field, is insensitive to electronic disturbances.
This prototype is able to estimate the position of the sun in the sky, even on cloudy days.
“It already works very well and, with adequate funding, could easily be transformed into a more compact and lightweight product,” says Gkanias, who presented the concept to Communications Engineering.
The spider web against drought
Who has never admired the tiny pearls of morning dew clinging to the filaments of spider webs?
Inspired by this, scientists have developed a fabric that replicates the silk threads secreted by arachnids and capable, like them, of retaining the smallest drop of water suspended in the air. An innovation that could play an important role in regions suffering from water scarcity.
Once this material is produced on a large scale, the collected water could reach “a considerable scale for real-world application,” Yongmei Zheng, co-author of the study published in Advanced Functional Materials, told AFP.
From the screw to the fire extinguisher
Researchers at the University of California have created a robot with a soft, inflatable structure that, like vines, “grows” in the direction of light or heat and can squeeze into seemingly smaller, more inaccessible places.
According to scientists, these tubular robots, about two meters long, could be used to identify hot spots and provide firefighting solutions.
“These robots are slow, but they are suitable for fighting widespread fires, such as peat fires, which can be a major source of carbon emissions,” co-author Charles Xiao told AFP.
From kombucha to printed circuit boards
Scientists at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of Bristol have invented flexible electronic circuits starting from a carpet of bacterial cultures, used in particular to prepare kombucha, a drink obtained from the oxidation of black tea leaves.
These “electronic kombuchas” can be used to illuminate small LED lights.
These bacterial culture mats, when dried, share the properties of fabrics or even skin. But they are durable and biodegradable and can even be soaked in water for days without being destroyed, the authors say.
Portable, lighter, more flexible and less expensive than plastic, these biomaterials could in the future allow technologies to be integrated more discreetly, even into the human body, such as for heart monitors, estimates AFP lead author Andrew Adamatzky and laboratory director.
The only obstacles at the moment: their durability and the start of mass production.
Scale robot
Pangolins, mammals with a soft body covered in scales, have the property of being able to curl up into a ball to protect themselves from predators.
According to a study published in Nature Communications, a tiny robot could adopt the same design to save human lives.
Intended to roll through our digestive tract before unfolding there, it could deliver drugs or stop internal bleeding in hard-to-reach parts of the human body.
“Every part of an animal has a particular function. It’s very elegant,” says Ren Hao Soon of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
2023-12-31 06:07:40
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