Finding technological inspiration in nature

When you look at the shape of an airplane, what does it remind you of? The answer, of course, is a bird.

Airplanes are an example of something called biomimicry (BYE-oh-mim-ah-kree), the science of using designs in nature to create a new product or solution. Nature is a great place to look for ideas because over millions of years, the natural world tends to create systems that work well.

Here’s a great example: In 1948, a Swiss inventor went for a walk and came home with little seed pods, called burrs, stuck to his pants. The inventor examined the pods with a microscope and saw that they had little “hooks” that grabbed the “loops” in the fabric of his pants. It was a good way for the plant to spread its seeds around by clinging to passing animals, but that Swiss inventor, George de Mestral, used the idea to create Velcro.

“Nature-inspired innovation is everywhere,” including medicine, architecture, car design and fabrics, said Sam Stier of the Biomimicry Institute in Montana.

Scientists are studying mosquitoes, which are able to bite you without you feeling it, to develop a new kind of needle that would make shots painless.

Engineering professor Christopher Viney is studying hippo sweat to come up with an all-day sunscreen and bug repellant in one. Hippos spend all day in the sun and never get burned. They also cover themselves with poop to attract a mate, but never have flies on them. The unusual structure of the molecules in a hippo’s sweat seem to protect them, so Viney wants to create a lotion “that has the same properties,” he said.

So next time you’re outside, look around you. You may come up with a nature-inspired idea of your own!

Here are some more naturally inspired ideas, products and solutions:

Shark swimsuit : In 2004, swimsuit maker Speedo introduced a high-tech racing swimsuit that mimics shark skin. The shark’s rough skin has tiny channels that actually help water move over its body. The swimsuit worked — too well. It gave such an advantage to swimmers who were wearing it that the suit was banned from major swim meets!

Lotus flower paint: This amazing plant grows in muddy environments but never gets dirty. Microscopic grooves all over the leaf trap air bubbles, so water and dirt that land on the leaf sit mostly on the bubbles, never touching the leaf. A light rain washes everything off. A company called Sto Corp. created a paint that dries with this same surface structure. Dirt won’t stick to it, so buildings painted with it stay clean.

Eliminating Lead in Indoor Ranges (Part One) | Action Target

Written by Clark Vargas

The significant source of particulate lead in an indoor range is the ammunition used. There are four ways lead is generated in the shooting range.

The first and worst, also because of particle size, is the primer that starts the powder ignition. It contains the chemical lead styphnate and other heavy metals that insure a proper and reliable ignition.

The second, and second worst, because of particle size, is the lead burn of the lead bullet tail of jacketed ammunition. The hot propelling gases result in atomization of molecular lead possibly the most dangerous because of great gas volumes if in haled because of range eddy currents.

The third is the lead particles spiting out of revolvers and barrel friction on all firearms. It results in varying size lead particles downrange of the firing line on the floor. The lead will be picked up by shoes and tracked elsewhere, where they may or may not be ingested.

The fourth method, and the one that generates up to 95% of the particulate lead, is the lead bullet collision with the so commonly used, “hard” 30° to 45° incline steel traps.

It is just not prudent any longer to simply design hard steel bullet traps unless “tracer ammunition” is going to be used for machine gun training.

Just by changing the projectile to totally encapsulated copper jacketed projectiles, it produces a 97% reduction in lead particulate when compared to using solid lead bullets. The use then of both lead-free primers and totally encapsulated projectiles results in airborne lead being totally, eliminated at the firing lines and breathing zone.

Military and law enforcement are the high consumers of ammunition and will still continue to utilizes jacketed bullets with lead primers for some time to come. The many calibers of ammunition used and trained with are, the 9mm, .38, .357, .45 calibers, 5.56mm and 7.62x51mm. 12ga slugs and double ought buck. Ammunition comes from a variety of manufacturers.

Although lead-primed, jacketed ammunition is the standard, it won’t be long before reliable non-lead primers become the new standard, along with totally encapsulated lead projectiles.

Hard bullet traps are the major reason, as much as 95% of for the unintended generation, of lead in dust and waste streams in firing ranges. Most existing bullet traps terminate the bullets energy with a metal to metal hard collision generating heat, lead slatter and fragments and dust.

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