Biomimicry

If you’ve never thought about how nature inspires innovation, consider the foot of a gecko. That’s right, the tiny foot of a little green lizard has inspired the next generation of cool products and gadgets that you probably already own. I’ll explain in a moment.

As part of my innovation efforts, I’m getting more heavily involved in the area of biomimicry and the idea of using nature as a guide to providing technological insights. The exploration of nature and its processes to yield innovative solutions to complex problems is an interesting and novel approach that not only researchers, but also some companies, are formally using as another way to “think outside the box” to identify business opportunities.  

These are exciting times, and we have access to millions of unique and wonderfully made species of plants, insects and animals to inspire future innovations. Already, pioneers in biomimicry are delivering solutions in nanotechnology, adhesives, sports, consumer goods, alternative energy, manufacturing, medicine, transportation and many other industries and markets.

Back to the gecko foot. Each toe contains about one million little hairs (setae), and each hair has about one thousand little sticky spatula tips to help the reptile climb and cling to walls, plant stems, rock ledges, you get the idea. This adds up to about two billion nano-sized split ends to help the gecko stick by intermolecular forces. By using gecko technology, product developers are finding new ways to innovate underwater adhesives, safety shoes, climbing gloves, medical equipment, robotics, automobile tires and much more.

The outlook is incredibly promising for bioinspiration over the next 15 years, as experts predict it will affect about $1 trillion of the world’s total output globally. Nationally, bioinspiration could represent $300 billion of the United States annual GDP, and account for 1.6 million U.S. jobs. That’s some serious impact!

Just this past month an article appeared in the American Chemical Society Journal Accounts of Chemical Research on some amazing progress that is being made in mimicking part of the process of natural photosynthesis. Call it an “artificial leaf” if you will.

As we all learn in high school, photosynthesis is the process where plants convert light from the sun, water from the soil, and carbon dioxide from the air into food sugars for the plant and oxygen that we can breathe. The oxygen that is produced is actually split off from water molecules. If the remaining hydrogen can be recovered in a synthetic process it might be an attractive and plentiful source of fuel energy for developing countries.

That is precisely what Daniel Nocera and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done. His synthetic leaf puts a light collector between two inexpensive chemical films where oxygen and hydrogen bubble away when the leaf is placed in water. Up until now similar processes have used prohibitively expensive platinum or semiconductor compounds. In contrast, the materials used in Nocera’s device are claimed to be naturally abundant - a critical factor in the research team’s goal is to help find ways to deliver abundant energy to the world’s undeveloped and poverty-stricken populations.  

Beyond the efforts of Dr. Nocera, scientists at the University of Toronto and the University of California at Berkeley are looking past the chemistry and into the mysterious realm of the quantum physics of photosynthesis. Here they are concerned with understanding, on the smallest scales of time and distance, how a plant captures, channels, and stores the energy of the millions of billions of photons that strike a leaf every second. The hope is that insights from the research could yield tiny molecular circuits that efficiently transport energy over long distances.  

Who knows where research into artificial photosynthesis will lead and what practical innovations will be discovered? What we do know is that the potential of looking at the wonders of nature for help in solving complex human problems is exciting, and I’m looking forward to sharing more examples of the progress!