Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking, giving everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at Patron says Oobi, Do I want
Speaker 1: to be like you? Oh? I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, everybody, I have a question for
Speaker 1: you away. Let's say you were going to put your
Speaker 1: life in the hands of a particular technology. Let's say
Speaker 1: it's some kind of biomedical device that you need to
Speaker 1: save your life, or maybe it's some kind of vehicle
Speaker 1: that if it fails, you're going to have a lot
Speaker 1: of trouble. But this device doesn't exist yet. You need
Speaker 1: to create it, Okay, And you've got two choices. Would
Speaker 1: you rather have one really smart scientist and one really
Speaker 1: smart engineer with about six months to work on it
Speaker 1: and a six figure but it, or would you rather
Speaker 1: have millions of really really bad scientists with four and
Speaker 1: a half billion years to work on it and pretty
Speaker 1: much infinite resources. So what you're telling me is that
Speaker 1: we're not exactly an emergency status since in theory we
Speaker 1: have four and a half billions. I'm going with the
Speaker 1: four and a half billion years approach, because I don't
Speaker 1: think I'd live that long even without whatever life threatening
Speaker 1: situation happens to be pointing, let's just say, what if
Speaker 1: you've uploaded your consciousness to the matrix, and and then
Speaker 1: four and a half billion years later, you're they're gonna
Speaker 1: put the hard drive that your brain is stored on
Speaker 1: on this vehicle that's gonna fly through the sky. Would
Speaker 1: you rather have this vehicle designed by what if? Alright,
Speaker 1: so the limited but talented humans or the completely brainless
Speaker 1: but amazingly well supplied other I think, I think, I
Speaker 1: see where you're going with this. And while many of us,
Speaker 1: I think, credit amazing geniuses for the innovations that make
Speaker 1: our lives convenient and safe and healthy, we can't ignore
Speaker 1: the fact that many of those innovations come to us
Speaker 1: courtesy of the fact that nature has had billions of
Speaker 1: years to try out different designs, not consciously, I want
Speaker 1: to make that clear, but all these different approaches have
Speaker 1: come around in life, and the ones that have worked
Speaker 1: the best have stuck around. So nature has gotten great
Speaker 1: at perfecting certain types of approaches. So I go with
Speaker 1: I go with the four and a half billion years
Speaker 1: dumb approach. Yeah, you saw through my analogy, Lauren would
Speaker 1: also I have the notes here. Yeah, I I it's
Speaker 1: a really hard question to answer when I already know
Speaker 1: the topic that we're discussing today. Okay, Well, my analogy,
Speaker 1: of course is that the millions of dumb scientists with
Speaker 1: nearly infinite time and resources is the process of biological evolution,
Speaker 1: which is a decently good one. Doesn't have very good
Speaker 1: foresight or any foresight, doesn't have very good top down
Speaker 1: control or any top down control necessarily, right, but it
Speaker 1: does have a lot of time and a lot of
Speaker 1: resources to work things out, and it can produce some
Speaker 1: really amazingly useful things and and some very specialized things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: things that if we wanted to try and create something
Speaker 1: technological that would give us an advantage in some way,
Speaker 1: or make our lives better in some way, or just
Speaker 1: achieve a certain type of task. Often it behooves us
Speaker 1: to take a look at nature and see if there
Speaker 1: are any examples in the natural world where this already exists,
Speaker 1: and then say, how can we do that same thing.
Speaker 1: That's actually something that scientists and engineers do all the time.
Speaker 1: It's this field known as bio mimetics or bio mimicry,
Speaker 1: and Jonathan recently did a video about biomemetics where he
Speaker 1: talked about some really interesting topics that's field. To be fair,
Speaker 1: I was copying an ant that had previously done a video,
Speaker 1: so I was I was bio mimic ng. Really all
Speaker 1: we ever do is copy ants, that's true, not not
Speaker 1: the organism we're talking about, the actual DreamWorks motion picture ants.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about my aunts. I mean, like, they're
Speaker 1: real and they are living organisms, so if you were
Speaker 1: to invent technology based on them, that would be biomemetics.
Speaker 1: We get loop your every episode. I'm not sure what
Speaker 1: what's causing it, but no, this is actually a really
Speaker 1: awesome topic just in general, and we so awesome that
Speaker 1: we want to cover it in a pair of podcasts.
Speaker 1: So this one we're like looking at a very kind
Speaker 1: of general approach to biomemetics. But we've got another one
Speaker 1: that's much more focused on a particular organism. But for
Speaker 1: this we thought we'd talked about lots of different examples
Speaker 1: that you can find of cutting edge technology that is
Speaker 1: taking its inspiration from stuff that's existed in some cases
Speaker 1: for billions of years, including some of the ones that
Speaker 1: you went into in your video, because we wanted to
Speaker 1: sort of break those out and really explain the weird,
Speaker 1: nitty gritty bits of of how it's working. Um. The
Speaker 1: first topic that we wanted to cover was how moths
Speaker 1: eyes have inspired better solar panels. Okay, now I talked
Speaker 1: about in the video, but this seems counterintuitive at first.
Speaker 1: Uh So, Lauren, why don't you kind of walk us
Speaker 1: through what is it that's special about a moth's eyes. Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's back it up. But before that, you know,
Speaker 1: we've spent a lot of time on this show talking
Speaker 1: about how solar panels are pretty inefficient, right. Um, as
Speaker 1: they stand, the best ones in the field are really
Speaker 1: only using some of the light hitting them. Um. Part
Speaker 1: of the problem being that each of the many layers
Speaker 1: of photovoltaic material that that make up solar panels reflects
Speaker 1: a little bit of light, meaning that that light that's
Speaker 1: reflecting can't be used to generate electricity, meaning that you're
Speaker 1: wasting potential. Right. It's like it's it's reflecting out of
Speaker 1: the solar panel, so you're not capturing it. Right. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like if you wanted to heat up your
Speaker 1: body as much as possible. You wouldn't want to wear
Speaker 1: bright colors that reflected all of the light off or
Speaker 1: or leave large parts of your body uncovered. That wouldn't
Speaker 1: be very effective either because yourself in mirrors. Wow, you
Speaker 1: are ruining my plans for the weekend. Alright. So so
Speaker 1: getting to the moth size, what what's so special about those?
Speaker 1: It turns out that they are really non reflective UM,
Speaker 1: which is really useful to nocturnal animals, which moths are,
Speaker 1: you know, they do their thing at night UM, And
Speaker 1: it means that they can see in really low lighting
Speaker 1: situations because lots of light gets through to the nerves
Speaker 1: in their eyes that that you know, work with their
Speaker 1: brains to sense light. It also helps in camouflage in
Speaker 1: the sense that they're reflecting less light so predators can't
Speaker 1: see them. But really we're focusing not to make too
Speaker 1: big a pun on the fact that it's redirecting light
Speaker 1: into the eye itself. And they have two structures in
Speaker 1: their eyes that help them out with this. At first,
Speaker 1: they have a tapital mirror, which is a lens at
Speaker 1: the back of their eyes that that bounces light back
Speaker 1: through the eyeball for a second chance at hitting all
Speaker 1: of those sensor nerves. Um. It's also why like like
Speaker 1: shark eys and cat eyes seemed to glow in the dark.
Speaker 1: Also alligator eyes. Yeah yeah, A lot lots of animals
Speaker 1: have this thing, um. And they've also got a special
Speaker 1: structure called and okay, this is for reals the technical term,
Speaker 1: you guys, a corneal nipple array. We can't say that
Speaker 1: on this podcast. This is science and it's it's this
Speaker 1: nanoscopic landscape of cone shaped structures, each only some like
Speaker 1: two D three hundred nanimators tall and wide. Wow. And
Speaker 1: remember a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. These
Speaker 1: are tiny, tiny structures. Yeah yeah, And and these we
Speaker 1: little things allow light to just kind of slip by
Speaker 1: that the shape doesn't reflect light the way that a
Speaker 1: flat surface would. Researchers started taking note of this all
Speaker 1: the way back in the nineteen seventies. Wow, all right, okay,
Speaker 1: so we see these little structures. We see that they
Speaker 1: are allowing light to slip through and not reflect off.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't necessarily mean there's a practical application right away.
Speaker 1: But someone managed to find one, right Yeah, researchers and
Speaker 1: you talked about them a little bit in detail. In
Speaker 1: the video at the North Carolina State University recreated the
Speaker 1: nanostructure and and started putting it into photovoltaic materials. So
Speaker 1: the exact amount of light that's regained by the structures
Speaker 1: in photovoltaics is unconfirmed at the moment, but but it's
Speaker 1: really cool that scientists are working on it. Right, So
Speaker 1: this is a promising technology. We do not yet know
Speaker 1: if it's efficacy is such that it's going to be
Speaker 1: a good return on investment. It may turn out that
Speaker 1: the expense of engineering this doesn't really justify whatever whatever
Speaker 1: increase and efficiency we might see, or it may turn
Speaker 1: out that it ends up boosting a should see enough
Speaker 1: where this becomes the norm. Yeah. Uh. One of those
Speaker 1: early problems that we've run into is that, um, the
Speaker 1: nano structures get really easily clogged with dirt. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're they're little pokey things, and so dirt can just
Speaker 1: kind of sidle up in there and get stuck. But
Speaker 1: but some researchers at the University of Cambridge are working
Speaker 1: on creating self cleaning materials that have this desired nanostructure,
Speaker 1: which involves like photo catalytic nanoparticles of titanium dioxide that
Speaker 1: break dirt down into just carbon dioxide and water. Of course,
Speaker 1: I mean that's what I would have done. Well, the
Speaker 1: cool thing here is I mean, since they get clogged
Speaker 1: with dirt, that would obviously mean that you are making
Speaker 1: the solar panel more sort of well the yeah, the
Speaker 1: level in front of the photovoltakes gets opaque and so
Speaker 1: no light is getting through. So yeah, obviously this is
Speaker 1: a very important part. Uh, yeah, it's pretty cool. We've
Speaker 1: talked about self cleaning materials a couple of times too,
Speaker 1: so I'm glad that we were able to to incorporate
Speaker 1: that in this discussion. Clearly I wasn't able to go
Speaker 1: into kind of detail in the video, so it's really
Speaker 1: neat to be able to get a chance to express
Speaker 1: it here. So one of those other topics that you
Speaker 1: talked about in the video was the centripetal spiral and
Speaker 1: nautilus shells and how they can be useful in in
Speaker 1: in fluid dynamics and okay, so so the gig with
Speaker 1: this guy's uh you know, turbines, which are just rotating
Speaker 1: devices that include a rod with blades attached to either
Speaker 1: move a fluid or to have a fluid move through
Speaker 1: the machine, thus generating work. UM. Turbines have existed for
Speaker 1: a few thousand years in the form of water wheels
Speaker 1: and wind meal wind meals, meals, windmills, yes, um and
Speaker 1: the and there have been a lot of modern advancements
Speaker 1: to these from the materials used to make them too
Speaker 1: very precise fluid dynamic driven physical tweaks UM. But they're
Speaker 1: still not perfect despite the best of our science, because
Speaker 1: they involve necessary resistance due to drag, a lot of noise,
Speaker 1: and continual where to their compos eonens. And this is
Speaker 1: important research because although the turbines that we have today
Speaker 1: work pretty well, we've got a lot of things that
Speaker 1: would benefit from moving more smoothly through fluid, like you
Speaker 1: know cars or airplanes. Yeah, atmosphere is a fluid, So
Speaker 1: having that sort of smooth movement through a fluid. Studying
Speaker 1: fluid dynamics, I mean, this is a complex field that
Speaker 1: concerns a lot of different sciences and also engineers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you have a more efficiently moving car, then
Speaker 1: you have to then you don't have to use as
Speaker 1: much fuel. Yeah, there are multiple benefits that spill out
Speaker 1: by this kind of study. One J Harmon, who's the
Speaker 1: CEO of an industrial fluid dynamics design company called pack Scientific,
Speaker 1: has patented a few designs based not on the age
Speaker 1: old turbine design, but rather on the golden spiral a
Speaker 1: k A logarithmic curve with a growth factor of Fi,
Speaker 1: or a Fibonacci spiral or the shape of a nautilus shell. Huh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: As it turns out, um, you can look around in
Speaker 1: nature and that that shape pops up in more than
Speaker 1: just knowledge shells right everywhere. Basically, Um, it's this really efficient,
Speaker 1: like sturdy, space saving shape. Lots of roses have petals
Speaker 1: arranged in this spiral. Sunflower seeds grow in the same pattern.
Speaker 1: Pine cones and pineapples have their spines arranged and like
Speaker 1: double five spirals, both clockwise and counterclockwise. Um, the human
Speaker 1: inner ear is a golden spiral. Whirlpools are this golden spiral. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when you see the shape appear over and over again,
Speaker 1: you're probably in the movie Uzumaki and you should watch out.
Speaker 1: Or so that's really that's kind of a nonsensical Japanese
Speaker 1: horror film. I don't I don't necessarily recommend it. The
Speaker 1: the interesting thing I find about the shape about seeing
Speaker 1: it over and over again, is that this is a
Speaker 1: suggestion that this particular shape has worked well for its
Speaker 1: numerous applications depending upon what it is you're looking at
Speaker 1: the fact that you're seeing it and not a bunch
Speaker 1: of different types of spirals. If you see one type
Speaker 1: of spiral happening repeatedly, that might be an indication that
Speaker 1: something's going on there that that merits further study, that
Speaker 1: perhaps there are ways of taking advantage of said shape. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Harmon maintains that creating things that either move fluid or
Speaker 1: or move through a fluid in this shape will make
Speaker 1: them just hella efficient, you know. Really, that's that that
Speaker 1: is the technical science term that that it will reduce
Speaker 1: drag to to not very much drag at all. Um.
Speaker 1: He claims that it's the shape of like least resistance
Speaker 1: conserving the most possible energy. And the idea here is
Speaker 1: that the shape enacts a centripetal force on the fluid.
Speaker 1: And I'm not a fluid dynamics expert, but I'm going
Speaker 1: to attempt to explain how how this goes. So, Okay, so,
Speaker 1: letting fluid flow through this spiral shape means that the
Speaker 1: fluid molecules along the edges of the surface will experience drag,
Speaker 1: but creating what's known as a boundary layer of slow
Speaker 1: moving fluid at the edges of the shape, which lets
Speaker 1: the rest of the fluid flow through the center of
Speaker 1: the shape faster, thus creating a vortex that kind of
Speaker 1: pulls the fluid through the shape. Good Lord, the fact
Speaker 1: that you have fluid through and flow so many times
Speaker 1: in that explanation and you managed to get through it,
Speaker 1: it blows my mind. I was speaking like five times
Speaker 1: as slow as flow flings fluids down by the flow. Shoot, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's but no, that's really cool. And and you know
Speaker 1: it's again. This is one of those things that you
Speaker 1: would have to test repeatedly to see if the effects
Speaker 1: are in fact measurable. But but it is one of
Speaker 1: those things that on a on a on a given
Speaker 1: level seems to make real sense. So the spiral is fascinating.
Speaker 1: But there are also other examples of biomimicry, including the
Speaker 1: amazing geck I tak about this in the video, and
Speaker 1: I talked about how I love geckos. That is totally true.
Speaker 1: I love I think they're the cutest things. And I've
Speaker 1: been fortunate enough to visit Hawaii a few times. Hawaii
Speaker 1: often if you are staying in a home in Hawaii,
Speaker 1: which is normally where I stay, I've got a friend
Speaker 1: who lives there. Um, all those homes are kind of
Speaker 1: a gecko palaces, And so you'll wake up and you'll
Speaker 1: just see geckos on your wall and on your ceiling,
Speaker 1: and occasionally you need to shake out your clothes just
Speaker 1: to make sure that you're not gonna have a gecko
Speaker 1: surprise when you put them on. Did they No? They
Speaker 1: they can? They could, I mean they could, they could
Speaker 1: really nip. I mean they're they're they're they're not. Their
Speaker 1: jaws are pretty small, and they tend to they are
Speaker 1: very timid critters. They run away, they don't. They are
Speaker 1: not the kind that want to come up to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but as you talked about in the video, and as
Speaker 1: I think we've alluded to briefly on this podcast before,
Speaker 1: geckos have some amazing feat. Yes, they are able to
Speaker 1: crawl up vertical surfaces. They're able to crawl across ceilings.
Speaker 1: They're able to hang by a single toe from a
Speaker 1: pane of glass. Yeah, So if you wanted to recreate
Speaker 1: this in the lab. How would you go about doing that? Well,
Speaker 1: you could think, maybe, oh, maybe I need to put
Speaker 1: some kind of really sticky material like glue on my hands,
Speaker 1: or maybe suction cups like giants suction cups. That's got
Speaker 1: to be how they do it really well? In these
Speaker 1: types of things aren't really very feasible, especially in the
Speaker 1: long term. If you've got some kind of sticky residue
Speaker 1: like a glue um that's not going to stick to
Speaker 1: some types of surfaces. They're multiple problems. Why are you
Speaker 1: going to stick to everything? To It's not necessarily going
Speaker 1: to be easy for you to remove your hand and
Speaker 1: then move it to the next space. And three, it
Speaker 1: will eventually wear off if you don't have some way
Speaker 1: of secreting said sticky substance. So how do they do it? Well,
Speaker 1: they don't do it. There was sticky substance. Do they
Speaker 1: do it? They do it through hair their nanotechnology. Yes,
Speaker 1: they do actually, uh so. Researchers studying geckos found out
Speaker 1: that they have nano scale beta caratin elastic hairs on
Speaker 1: their feet and toes. And let me let me break
Speaker 1: that down for you, just in case you that that
Speaker 1: doesn't really mean a whole lot to you in the
Speaker 1: particular configuration of words. Um, they're they're very strong, very
Speaker 1: thin protein structures. Beta carratins are what make up like reptiles,
Speaker 1: scales and claws and shells uh and also birds, feathers,
Speaker 1: beaks and claws. They've got about the same toughness of
Speaker 1: kitan which makes up sea bug shells, lobsters and crabs
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff. Um. But they can
Speaker 1: be really stretching in bendy, especially at the nano scale,
Speaker 1: in which, as we have spoken about before, everything is
Speaker 1: super wicky. Yeah. Yeah, things on the nano scale have
Speaker 1: they behave in different ways than stuff that we're used
Speaker 1: to on the macro scale. So when you get down
Speaker 1: to the nano scale, you're actually getting small enough where
Speaker 1: quantum effects are to take place to which is kind
Speaker 1: of cool. Yeah. So but wait a second. I can
Speaker 1: stick my head, which is covered in hair if you
Speaker 1: can't see it right now, against a wall, and that
Speaker 1: does not help me stick to the wall. So how
Speaker 1: are these little hair like fibers Helmell. First of all,
Speaker 1: the human hair is, you know, some hundred thousand nanometers thick,
Speaker 1: so it's not nearly on the same scale. All right,
Speaker 1: These we little hairs are so we that they interact
Speaker 1: on a molecular level with the stuff that that walls
Speaker 1: or glass or whatever are made of. Um, what's called
Speaker 1: the Vanderwalls force kicks in and and whayam, the critter
Speaker 1: can climb right up. Something. I love Oasis song about that,
Speaker 1: You're my vonder Walls. What's just me? Well, all joking aside,
Speaker 1: or at least most of it aside Vanderwall's force. This
Speaker 1: is something that can be either an attractive force or
Speaker 1: a repulsive force. It's not necessarily one or the It's
Speaker 1: it's not just attraction. But this is something we talked
Speaker 1: about on a molecular level with surfaces and their their
Speaker 1: tendency to either add here or repulse. So a few
Speaker 1: different research teams have been working on replicating this in materials.
Speaker 1: There's a team, particularly from the Zoological Institute at the
Speaker 1: University of Keel, that created a silicone tape that's patterned
Speaker 1: with tiny hairs, no glue, no residue, works underwater. It
Speaker 1: can be peeled off and restuck to things thousands of
Speaker 1: times without losing its gripping power. See, I want to
Speaker 1: have one of those toys that you used to have
Speaker 1: where you could throw it against the wall very slowly
Speaker 1: crawled down using this kind of approach, and you could
Speaker 1: just throw it against the or the wall or a
Speaker 1: window or anything and it just splats and stays there.
Speaker 1: That would be I would have fun with that. That
Speaker 1: would be minutes of a good fun. Okay, you for
Speaker 1: you long minutes a good fun. However, I'm a simple
Speaker 1: humanating and could easily stretch that into a full afternoon
Speaker 1: of activities. So oh and part part of the thing
Speaker 1: here is that these hairs aren't the only things that
Speaker 1: that get goes have going for them in terms of
Speaker 1: sticking capacity. Um, they're they're well climbing ability also involves
Speaker 1: the curved shape of their toes um and the way
Speaker 1: that their feet and toes spread out when they make
Speaker 1: contact with the surface, and their toes self cleaning abilities.
Speaker 1: Self cleaning. Now, this is kind of going back to
Speaker 1: what we had to you know, the discussion about the
Speaker 1: little projections and the moth I projections that when we
Speaker 1: made the synthetic versions, we had to come up with
Speaker 1: some sort of self cleaning process in order to make
Speaker 1: the solar panels and I get all clogged up and opaque.
Speaker 1: So what's going on here? Well, our our friendly neighborhood,
Speaker 1: creepy Crawley researchers at the University of Akron, and I
Speaker 1: do want to mention you. You've pronounced it in the
Speaker 1: video Akron and that has to be fair. He was
Speaker 1: talking about the planet. To be fair, that only happened
Speaker 1: in one take, and Dan chose that take. I was,
Speaker 1: I was, I was born in Makron, so I have
Speaker 1: so I just I needed to point it. I understand.
Speaker 1: I have Ohio State pride. I watched that video recently,
Speaker 1: as in just before we went into this podcast, and
Speaker 1: I winced when I realized that was the take he
Speaker 1: went with. At any rate, Um, we we've we've mentioned
Speaker 1: these researchers a couple of times recently, I think, and
Speaker 1: they published some research about Getto's footprints that has helped
Speaker 1: helped us kind of solve this puzzle a little bit further.
Speaker 1: It turns out the getto footprints contain residue of these
Speaker 1: thin oils called phosphilipids UM, which we're pretty sure gettos
Speaker 1: excrete to keep all those little nano hairs clean UM.
Speaker 1: And it might also help them quickly adhere to and
Speaker 1: release from surfaces, right, So that that would make sense.
Speaker 1: You would want to keep the hairs clear of any
Speaker 1: debris because otherwise it would it would inhibit your exactly,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be able to adhere to the wall anymore.
Speaker 1: And also, yeah, the oil making it easier to h
Speaker 1: to release and then put your foot down and then
Speaker 1: release again in order to continue motion. Uh. Again, it
Speaker 1: makes sense. Obviously, these are things that are under continuing study.
Speaker 1: So it's uh, it seems to be a solid hypothesis.
Speaker 1: We'll see if it after we're able to study it further,
Speaker 1: if it holds true. Yeah, and once once we get
Speaker 1: that figured out, it might help some of these other
Speaker 1: physical process uh researchers to to perfect the designs that
Speaker 1: they're making. Like like, in addition to that silicone tape,
Speaker 1: some other researchers are working with carbon nanotubes to reproduce
Speaker 1: the physical structures of these little hairs. Man, carbon nanotubes,
Speaker 1: why can't they do? They are magic? They are They're
Speaker 1: not really, but they seem like it. No real magic,
Speaker 1: thanks Joe. They're made by wizards. Um. The most success
Speaker 1: that these researchers have seen so far has been with
Speaker 1: a vertically aligned, single walled carbon nanotubes in case you
Speaker 1: were curious, and I know you were um which could
Speaker 1: could hypothetically have a greater maximum sticking power than the
Speaker 1: original gecko feed themselves. That's pretty awesome. I have heard
Speaker 1: of uh people determined to make kind of a wall
Speaker 1: climbing suit using essentially this approach, using carbon nanotubes as
Speaker 1: the gripping power for that kind of suit. So essentially,
Speaker 1: this is a a different sort of spiky suit. We've
Speaker 1: talked about other ones, like we talked about the spiky
Speaker 1: suit that gives you an alert if there's an oncoming object,
Speaker 1: but this, in this case, it would it would be
Speaker 1: a totally different type of spicy suit that would allow
Speaker 1: you to climb walls. I guess you could incorporate both
Speaker 1: so that you could finally get a Spider Man outfit going. Well,
Speaker 1: you still wouldn't have the webs, no, but stay tuned
Speaker 1: for digging fans, because we might actually address some of
Speaker 1: that in a future podcast, you know. But there are
Speaker 1: a lot of other ways that bio mimicry can come
Speaker 1: into the way we create new pieces of technology, and
Speaker 1: especially in robotic that's a huge one, and we've talked
Speaker 1: about that in the past two Yeah. One thing I'd
Speaker 1: like to say about robotics is that you can look
Speaker 1: to bio mimicry or biomemetics, not just to inspire the
Speaker 1: physical designs, like okay, so we can make something like
Speaker 1: get feed the materials right now, not just the materials,
Speaker 1: not just the static designs, but you can use bio
Speaker 1: memetics to program behavior. Uh. And what I had in
Speaker 1: mind was the Boston Dynamics robots that we've talked about,
Speaker 1: right Oh yeah, yeah, like like Big Dog, yeah, Big
Speaker 1: Dog or the wild Cat. You know these uh, these
Speaker 1: running four legged robots, or they also have bipedal robots
Speaker 1: walking two legged robots. It's interesting that when you look
Speaker 1: at robots, most of them, if they're going to be
Speaker 1: moving around, they have tracks or they have wheels. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Legs are tough. Yeah that makes sense. Wheels are very
Speaker 1: energy efficient, they're you know, they're great, they're easy to program,
Speaker 1: but but they're not good for everything. Right. We have
Speaker 1: legs for a reason. We can do all kinds of
Speaker 1: stuff that most robots can't do. We can climb trees,
Speaker 1: we can scrabble over weird shaped rocks, we can we
Speaker 1: can use them to help propel us for swimming a
Speaker 1: lot of different There is very very versatile in the
Speaker 1: way that wheels are not not at all. And so
Speaker 1: it's not just the fact that we're making robots that
Speaker 1: have legs that's bio mimetic, but it's also the way
Speaker 1: that we programmed legs. I mean, when you think about this,
Speaker 1: say you're you're programming a robot to move around, Well,
Speaker 1: if it just has wheels, that's pretty simple. You can say,
Speaker 1: roll this way to go forward, roll this way to
Speaker 1: go back, you know, turn with this differential and in
Speaker 1: the different wheels to go one way or the other.
Speaker 1: But if you've got legs, yeah, depending upon how many
Speaker 1: means you have to take into account the freedom of movement,
Speaker 1: how many how many points of freedom of movement do
Speaker 1: those legs have. What is the weight of the robot,
Speaker 1: what's the momentum the robot's going to be experiencing balance
Speaker 1: the weight on each of the four legs as they're
Speaker 1: moving right or however many legs, because if you have
Speaker 1: four legs is on a robot, I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: obvious at what time each leg should move right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of biomimicry that goes on in
Speaker 1: the robotics field, a lot of study of how animals
Speaker 1: move and then attempting to engineer that so that a
Speaker 1: robot can take advantage of this particular approach. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've seen it in nature, how animals are able to
Speaker 1: maneuver a depthly through an environment, And if we're able
Speaker 1: to copy that, then that's a lot easier than just
Speaker 1: trying to innovate, you know, from from nothing. Yeah. One
Speaker 1: of my favorite biommedic designs that I've seen in robot
Speaker 1: locomotion is something we've talked about on this podcast before.
Speaker 1: It's the way the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot stumbles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if he stumbles to catch itself when it's been knocked
Speaker 1: off balance. Right, if it if it were to step,
Speaker 1: say on an unsteady rock and the rock gave way,
Speaker 1: it would be able to stumble and catch itself or
Speaker 1: to shift its weight around. Yeah, and in a way
Speaker 1: that looks really unnerving lee realistic. Right. Or or or
Speaker 1: if someone who perhaps ops when you're watching a video
Speaker 1: appears to be an uncarrying sociopath kicks the dog, it
Speaker 1: can catch itself. I realized, I'm that this human being
Speaker 1: is probably someone who has a rich emotional life and
Speaker 1: never never kick a real animal. But it's just that
Speaker 1: it's probably never kicked the robot unless for strict testing purpose.
Speaker 1: It's it's it was just one of those reactions where
Speaker 1: you immediately think you are a bad person. They're not
Speaker 1: a bad person. It's just that's the reaction I had
Speaker 1: immediately upon watching the video of someone kicking this dog,
Speaker 1: which not dog, but this robot, which then would catch itself. Um.
Speaker 1: I had another one which I had to expel to include,
Speaker 1: which was the Veloci roach. I've read about this one.
Speaker 1: This was one of those robots that as soon as
Speaker 1: you read about you think science there's some things you
Speaker 1: can do and some things you should do, and those
Speaker 1: two things do not always coincide. Why have you created
Speaker 1: a robotic cockroach? It's the classic Ean Malcolm question. Your
Speaker 1: scientists so concerned with whether or not they could, they
Speaker 1: didn't stop to think if they should. Man and Malcolm, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be a point where we're just going to
Speaker 1: do an entire podcast doing our own impressions of various celebrities,
Speaker 1: and we get scientists and obviously Nick Cage is going
Speaker 1: to be one of the three. I mean, that's going
Speaker 1: to have to happen. You guys have already been treated
Speaker 1: to Knowles excellent Nicholas Cage, right, Uh not, go back
Speaker 1: and listen to our podcast about bees. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: ahead and call Jay Moore doing an impression of Christopher
Speaker 1: walking because my impression of Christopher walking is so bad
Speaker 1: I have to remove it, at least by one impressionist
Speaker 1: at any rate. So the Veloci Roach Getting Back on
Speaker 1: Track is a robot that that mimics the movement and
Speaker 1: uh and and body size of a cockroach. They took
Speaker 1: the cockroach as sort of the the inspiration for the
Speaker 1: design of the robot and for its size, it's one
Speaker 1: of the fastest robots for its size. You know, you
Speaker 1: have to take the scale into consideration. Also, you can
Speaker 1: just see it in lots of different other examples in robotics.
Speaker 1: Is These are just a couple of the ones that
Speaker 1: we thought would be fun to talk about, but it's
Speaker 1: throughout the entire industry Beyond that, we're looking at biomimicry
Speaker 1: for things not just technology related, but sort of on
Speaker 1: a a civil engineering and social engineering level. Social insects
Speaker 1: have become an area of study for that reason, because
Speaker 1: social insects, if you were to look at an individual
Speaker 1: insect that has uh, this kind of social structure, so
Speaker 1: something like an ant or a b Now that particular
Speaker 1: uh example, that particular individual insect, its behaviors are pretty simple. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not really what we would call smart. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not at all smart. It's it's pretty dumb in the
Speaker 1: big in the big, grand scheme of things. However, the
Speaker 1: collection of these insects can behave in very comple x
Speaker 1: and seemingly intelligent ways and respond to dynamic changes in
Speaker 1: its environment and a very impressive approach, And that kind
Speaker 1: of thing fascinates scientists and engineers and could potentially let
Speaker 1: us answer some questions that could end up benefiting humans
Speaker 1: down the line. I would argue that that bees are
Speaker 1: probably more smart than ants, but maybe only because I
Speaker 1: know bees better. Maybe maybe we should do a future
Speaker 1: of ants podcast. Yeah yeah, I don't know if you've
Speaker 1: noticed we do insect podcasts. Yeah, yeah, well that's fair.
Speaker 1: Just don't just don't do the same with the racknets. Okay,
Speaker 1: make that promise for me. We promised you Okay, good.
Speaker 1: It's an easy promise to make because we already did
Speaker 1: that one. But anyway, so let's talk about beatles beets
Speaker 1: Let's do talk about beatles, not not not the people
Speaker 1: say we beatle around. Wow. So you took a band
Speaker 1: that itself was a essentially a weak copy of another band.
Speaker 1: But they're a biommedic man, do you know what that's fair?
Speaker 1: I am going to allow it? Um all right, No,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about beetles and irrigation, not irrigating your beetle.
Speaker 1: So b E t l E. That's correct, not beatle,
Speaker 1: but beetle. So in this case, I'm talking about an
Speaker 1: engineer who looked at the numb beetle and was inspired
Speaker 1: to create a way of extracting water from the air.
Speaker 1: See this particular beetle, it tends to live in very
Speaker 1: arid conditions. And one of the things that will it
Speaker 1: does is that it will come out onto the surface
Speaker 1: of whatever its environment is in the early morning, uh,
Speaker 1: and will allow it allows water to collect on its shell,
Speaker 1: it condenses upon its shell, and then it uses that
Speaker 1: water to help survive. So the this engineer looked at
Speaker 1: that and said, huh, is there something I could do
Speaker 1: that to mimic this sort of behavior, and he came
Speaker 1: up with a system that had a self powered pump
Speaker 1: and a series of tubes, not unlike the internet. No wait,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, that's not really a series of tubes. Now,
Speaker 1: there really was a series of tubes underground that pumped
Speaker 1: cool air to this UH to this above ground portion
Speaker 1: of the of the device. Yeah, it's called the air drop.
Speaker 1: So the above ground portion of the air drop gets
Speaker 1: cooled by this air that's flowing through these underground pipes,
Speaker 1: and that that cooling means that water will condense on
Speaker 1: the air drop and then flow down into collection area.
Speaker 1: And specifically, this would be used to collect water to
Speaker 1: UH to then give over to a garden um. It's
Speaker 1: not a lot of water. You would not imagine it
Speaker 1: to be a lot of water. This is for arid
Speaker 1: locations where you're pulling tiny amounts of moisture of the air,
Speaker 1: but it can be enough to grow certain types of plants.
Speaker 1: So it's a really interesting approach and it also a
Speaker 1: one It won an award. I think he got some
Speaker 1: thing like dollars to continue to develop the idea. And
Speaker 1: there are a lot of countries that are particularly interested
Speaker 1: in looking at this approach, seeing if it's scalable, seeing
Speaker 1: if it's if it's a practical approach. So it's really
Speaker 1: interesting as well. Yeah, definitely. One of the other things
Speaker 1: that we wanted to talk about was a suggestion from
Speaker 1: um from from one of our YouTube viewers on the
Speaker 1: video that you Jonathan did about BioMedics um and this
Speaker 1: was user Magic of Dark. So, so thank you sir
Speaker 1: or madam for for writing in so Magic of Dark.
Speaker 1: Here here is the the scenario I'm going to paint
Speaker 1: for you. I'm not gonna say immediately what it was
Speaker 1: you requested, it will become a parent. But way back
Speaker 1: in George Demistral went for a walk. Now this guy
Speaker 1: is a Swiss engineer, all right, He's going out there,
Speaker 1: he's walking. He's looking for new and exciting ways to
Speaker 1: make hot chocolate. Yeah, you know, the way Swiss engineers do.
Speaker 1: And eventually gets back after the end of his walk
Speaker 1: and starts to do what any self respecting walking natural
Speaker 1: naturalist slash engineer would do, which is starting to pick
Speaker 1: the burrs that have accumulated on clothing and his dog
Speaker 1: out of the various fabrics and hairs. If you have
Speaker 1: a longer haired dog. Picking burrs off the dog is
Speaker 1: a sad and very labor intensive processes. It's much easier
Speaker 1: just to take scissors to the dog. What the dog
Speaker 1: doesn't know? My dog. My dog is a hairy dog
Speaker 1: and he gets birds all in his face. I have
Speaker 1: had to deal with this. But my dog tends to
Speaker 1: get them stuck in his paws. So it's also, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's just but no, this is not sad story, guys.
Speaker 1: This is a story about how the Swiss engineer looked
Speaker 1: at these birds and how they had hooked into his
Speaker 1: clothing and said, wait, is there a way that I
Speaker 1: could engineer a fabric that could do the same thing
Speaker 1: and act as a fastener, Because here I'm seeing a
Speaker 1: natural substance the doing this. Could we do this? So
Speaker 1: that's on purpose? And so he created a pair of
Speaker 1: fabrics that complimented one another. One of those fabrics had
Speaker 1: lots of tiny hooks in it. The other fabric had
Speaker 1: lots of tiny hoops in it, so that the hooks
Speaker 1: and the hoops would interlock when you put them together,
Speaker 1: and if you pulled them apart, they could snap loose.
Speaker 1: And thus velcrow was born. Now Velcrow is named after
Speaker 1: a combination of the words velvet and crochet. If you crochet,
Speaker 1: you use a little hook, so he wouldn't patent it
Speaker 1: until nineteen fifty five. Of course, back in nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: there was a little thing called World War two that
Speaker 1: was going on, so that was getting people really busy,
Speaker 1: and the original velcrow was made from cotton. Now eventually
Speaker 1: Mistral would switch over to nylon because cotton would wear
Speaker 1: out after you used it for a while and nylon
Speaker 1: was a little more resilient and end up getting an
Speaker 1: enormous pr boost during the nineteen sixties because that's when
Speaker 1: the space race was in full effect. And one of
Speaker 1: the problems that NASA had was, hey, you know, if
Speaker 1: we go out to space, we're in free fall. So
Speaker 1: we're in this environment where there's weightlessness or or very
Speaker 1: you know, micro gravity is in in in play. So
Speaker 1: how do we keep the stuff what we bring someplace
Speaker 1: where it's not going to get in the way. And
Speaker 1: they came up with, hey, why don't we use this
Speaker 1: velcrow stuff. It's it's easier than tying, especially if you're
Speaker 1: wearing a space suit. You know, you don't have the
Speaker 1: manual dexterity to necessarily tie something to something else, and
Speaker 1: it ended up being kind of a miracle uh technology
Speaker 1: for use during the Space Race. It was not invented
Speaker 1: specifically for that. That often ends up being one of
Speaker 1: those facts you'll hear things like, you know, ten technologies
Speaker 1: NASA invented. It was invented before the Space Race, but
Speaker 1: it was incredibly useful during the Space Race, and as
Speaker 1: a result of that ended up becoming well known, so
Speaker 1: much so that the term Velcrow is now used for
Speaker 1: any sort of materials where it has this hook and
Speaker 1: and loop system. Not not all of those are technically
Speaker 1: from the company Velcrow. It's proprietary, right, But it's sort
Speaker 1: of like Frisbee or rock or clean necks or band aids.
Speaker 1: You know, the sort of thing where one example, the
Speaker 1: primary example, becomes the name for all of the product.
Speaker 1: It's sort of some jello same sort of thing. So anyway,
Speaker 1: that's the story. It's pretty cool. It was a big success,
Speaker 1: and of course we all know now that it went
Speaker 1: on to forever replace all shoelaces. I did have Velcrow
Speaker 1: sneakers early nineties. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also had hypercolor
Speaker 1: T shirts, but that's not biomimicry. That's just awesome. I
Speaker 1: I think that in fashion all buttons, laces, and buckles
Speaker 1: of all kinds should be replaced by I really dislike
Speaker 1: velcro in my clothing. I hate the noise. I can't
Speaker 1: stand the noise. I also think all pants should have
Speaker 1: elastic ankles. I don't like you anymore. I have so
Speaker 1: many jokes, but none of them are appropriate, So I'm
Speaker 1: going to move on. Uh. Well, the last thing I
Speaker 1: was really gonna look at, and by look at, I
Speaker 1: mean just talk about, because he can't really look at it,
Speaker 1: is nanotechnology. Again, we have a really good microscope. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and even then, if you're out talking about optical microscope,
Speaker 1: you can't really look at it because if you're at
Speaker 1: a small enough scale, you're actually so small that light
Speaker 1: itself is not going to pick you up. So um So, anyway,
Speaker 1: nanotechnology has become a growing industry in in the world
Speaker 1: of science and tech, and a lot of that is
Speaker 1: all about biomimicry, because, as it turns out, building stuff
Speaker 1: on the nano scale is really hard. Like I mentioned,
Speaker 1: we have quantum effects that can come into play there,
Speaker 1: and and it is difficult even for us to be
Speaker 1: able to see, let alone manipulate things down at that scale. Well,
Speaker 1: when we've talked about molecular assemblers on this show before,
Speaker 1: you know, that's this idea that that you'd have this
Speaker 1: kind of almost magic machine that could on the nanoscale
Speaker 1: build tiny, tiny little components and you know, make food
Speaker 1: or make pieces for your starship. It would just build
Speaker 1: everything molecule by molecule. Well, if that's ever possible in
Speaker 1: real life, it seems like it's a long way away.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just it's so hard to imagine making
Speaker 1: something like that. But your body has stuff in it
Speaker 1: right now pretty much does that. You are doing that
Speaker 1: as we speak. Yeah, the ribosomes in your cells are
Speaker 1: basically molecular simblers. They're assembling molecules piece at a time.
Speaker 1: And then you have things like viruses, which one of
Speaker 1: those one of those things that's really difficult to classify.
Speaker 1: I mean, you still have those those classic arguments of
Speaker 1: does a virus count as life or not? Because it
Speaker 1: exhibits many of the traits of life, but not necessarily
Speaker 1: all of them, and it is an incredibly simple structure.
Speaker 1: But the simple structure, which is essentially you got a
Speaker 1: protein shell and then you've got the virus that's inside
Speaker 1: the shell, and the protein shell will doc with certain
Speaker 1: types of cells, which then allows the virus to invade
Speaker 1: the cell and essentially take over the cells production facilities
Speaker 1: to make more viruses which they can spread out and
Speaker 1: do the same to other cells. Well, there could be
Speaker 1: some actual practical uses of this in our world that
Speaker 1: are not involved with making someone sick. It could be
Speaker 1: making someone better. And the idea is to use something
Speaker 1: like a virus shell that would have the right proteins
Speaker 1: on it to dock with certain types of cells, specifically
Speaker 1: cancer cells, and then you scoop out whatever the viral
Speaker 1: material would have been inside this virus shell, and inside
Speaker 1: you put chemotherapy drugs, so you can deliver chemotherapy drugs
Speaker 1: to specific cells as opposed to a region, and in theory,
Speaker 1: you would be able to deliver an effective medicine while
Speaker 1: limiting the side effects as much as is possible. Right,
Speaker 1: because one of the problems with a wide spread chemotherapy
Speaker 1: is that it's going to make you very sick because
Speaker 1: because it's getting into your your the poisons are are
Speaker 1: getting into your other tissues, and that's bad times for you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's if you can target specifically the cancer cells,
Speaker 1: then yeah, you really minimize that that area effect that
Speaker 1: you get otherwise. So it's a really promising area of research.
Speaker 1: It's obviously incredibly complex, it's not you know, the idea
Speaker 1: is simple, the execution is much more difficult. But it's
Speaker 1: something that a lot of people are looking into. And
Speaker 1: I got a chance a few years ago to interview
Speaker 1: a nanotechnology expert at Emory, and he was talking about
Speaker 1: how using viruses was one of the most promising approaches
Speaker 1: because why invent something that needs to do a specific
Speaker 1: task if there's already an example of it on nature,
Speaker 1: which is exactly what we've been talking about this whole podcast.
Speaker 1: So again, it's it's that the nanotechnology world is relatively
Speaker 1: new to us and strange and unusual, but in nature,
Speaker 1: this has been part of the way things work for
Speaker 1: billions of years. So we should look to examples because
Speaker 1: that will be at least a first step into that world,
Speaker 1: and you know, we'll probably create new approaches that are
Speaker 1: built on those first steps, that go beyond what nature does.
Speaker 1: But it's a good starting point. So yeah, pretty cool stuff,
Speaker 1: and they're probably thousands of other examples of biomimicry that
Speaker 1: we could talk about tens of thous yeah, so millions
Speaker 1: of All right, well, let's not go overboard. So but
Speaker 1: if there, if we happen to have accidentally skipped over
Speaker 1: one that you, dear listener hold as the most important
Speaker 1: example of biomimicry, and you think, why didn't you talk
Speaker 1: about this? Let us know, because we'd love to be
Speaker 1: able to cover that perhaps in the future episode um
Speaker 1: little word, though, if it's about spiders, you can hold off,
Speaker 1: hold back that that message. And then if we didn't
Speaker 1: talk about spiders the way you wanted us to, then
Speaker 1: you can let us know. But really, if there are
Speaker 1: other examples that you think, no, this is super cool
Speaker 1: and people need to know about it, let us know.
Speaker 1: And the best way to get into contact with us
Speaker 1: is through Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus, all three places.
Speaker 1: You can find us with the handle FW thinking and
Speaker 1: we will talk to you again really soon. For more
Speaker 1: on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward
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