Even engineers can find inspiration in biology

For all the encouragement to get into interdisciplinary research, many academic institutions still run themselves on strictly subject oriented lines. If you are an innovator looking to solve a problem, or to do something neat that you have in mind, you really should not give a damn if the solution comes from biology, physics, chemistry or magic. Well, you may have trouble raising money for the latter, but you could try all the same.

 

A new journal from the Institute of Physics, Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, with the catchy subhead "Learning from nature," picks up on an increasingly fashionable area, the notion that biology can offer ideas when we want to solve technical problems. For example, evolution has thrown up some fascinating materials, such as bone. And we still haven't managed to make robots that can walk like people.

 

Maybe we could devise some really neat structures if we knew how bone put itself together. The first issue of the journal has an article on just this. There's another, on "Micro-optical artificial compound eyes" that starts off by seeing how flies manage such wondrous things with their eyes, and then moves on to consider the question "what is the better approach for extremely miniaturized imaging systems—just scaling of classical lens designs or being inspired by alternative imaging principles evolved by nature in the case of small insects?"

 

The good news is that you can catch this year's issues of the journal free.