Biomimicry Treetv Subs NL V3
Summary
TLDRThis script explores the concept of biomimicry, where nature's time-tested strategies inspire sustainable solutions. From leveraging sunlight and water to fostering cooperation and recycling, it highlights how organisms have mastered living in harmony with Earth. The narrative delves into innovative applications, such as using spider silk's strength, abalone shell's toughness, and mimicking coral reefs to sequester CO2 in concrete. It underscores the potential of biomimicry to revolutionize materials, energy, water conservation, and agriculture, advocating for a future where human innovation aligns with nature's wisdom for a sustainable world.
Takeaways
- 🌿 Life on Earth has evolved sustainable practices over 3.8 billion years, offering valuable lessons for human innovation.
- 🔬 Biomimicry is a discipline that emulates nature's solutions to human challenges, inspiring greener and more efficient technologies.
- ☀️ Life operates primarily on sunlight, highlighting the importance of renewable energy sources for sustainable living.
- 💧 Water is the universal solvent for life's chemistry, contrasting with the toxic solvents often used in human industrial processes.
- 🌍 Local expertise is crucial for organisms, emphasizing the need for understanding and adapting to local environments for sustainable practices.
- 🤝 Cooperation is a key principle of life, with mutual benefits and the avoidance of waste, suggesting the importance of collaboration in human endeavors.
- 🏗️ Nature's chemistry is based on safe elements and gentle reactions, challenging the industrial reliance on toxic elements and brute force methods.
- 🕸️ Spiders create incredibly strong silk at room temperature and pressure, demonstrating the potential for low-energy material production.
- 🐚 Abalone shells are an example of nature's ability to produce tough materials like ceramics through self-assembly, without the need for high heat or pressure.
- 🌳 Plants and other organisms use CO2 as a building block, inspiring technologies that convert greenhouse gases into useful products.
- 🏢 The potential for using CO2 in construction materials like concrete, as seen in coral reefs, presents an opportunity for carbon sequestration in buildings.
- 🐜 Algorithms inspired by ant and bee communication have been used to reduce energy demand, showing the potential of biomimicry in energy conservation.
- 🌬️ Wind farms designed based on the schooling behavior of fish have demonstrated increased efficiency with less land use.
- 🐞 The Namibian beetle's ability to collect water from fog has been mimicked to create self-filling water bottles and improve fog-catching nets.
- 🐟 Aquatic organisms' desalination processes have inspired new membrane technologies for more efficient and less energy-intensive water purification.
- 🌱 Scientists are exploring plants' adaptations to extreme conditions to develop crops that require less water, addressing the needs of a water-stressed world.
- 🎨 Structural color in nature, such as in peacock feathers, offers a sustainable alternative to chemical pigments in paints and coatings.
- 🌿 The Lotus effect, inspired by the self-cleaning properties of the lotus leaf, has led to the development of non-chemical cleaning solutions for various surfaces.
- 🦈 Sharklet Technologies mimics the shark skin's texture to prevent bacterial adhesion, offering a non-chemical approach to infection control.
Q & A
What is the core idea behind biomimicry?
-The core idea behind biomimicry is to look to nature for sustainable solutions that have already been developed by organisms over billions of years, rather than inventing new ones from scratch.
What are some principles of life that biomimicry seeks to emulate?
-Biomimicry seeks to emulate principles such as running on sunlight, using water as a universal solvent, relying on local expertise, banking on cooperation, upcycling waste, and not fouling one's own nest.
How does nature's chemistry differ from our synthetic chemistry?
-Nature's chemistry uses a small subset of the periodic table with safe elements and employs elegant, low-temperature, low-pressure, and low-toxicity reactions, whereas our synthetic chemistry uses every element, including toxic ones, and relies on brute force reactions.
What is an example of biomimicry in material manufacturing?
-One example is the spider's ability to create a fiber from its web that is five times stronger than steel at room temperature and low pressure, which is being studied by fiber manufacturers.
How is biomimicry applied to address the issue of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
-Companies like Novomer are mimicking the natural process of converting carbon dioxide into biodegradable plastics, while Newlight uses methane to create packaging, demonstrating the use of greenhouse gases in creating useful products.
What is the significance of the Namibian beetle in biomimicry?
-The Namibian beetle efficiently condenses water from fog using special structures on its wing scales, which is 10 times better than our current fog-catching nets, and has inspired the creation of self-filling water bottles.
How does the concept of biomimicry apply to energy conservation?
-Biomimicry in energy conservation can be seen in companies like Regen, which uses algorithms inspired by ants and bees to reduce peak demand by 25 to 30 percent, or Caltech students who mimicked fish schooling behavior to increase wind power output.
What is the 'Lotus effect' and how is it applied in cleaning technologies?
-The 'Lotus effect' refers to the self-cleaning properties of the lotus leaf, which uses a structural solution with tiny bumps to repel water and dirt. This concept has been applied in fabrics, roofing tiles, and paints to create surfaces that clean themselves without chemicals.
How does biomimicry address the issue of superbugs and bacterial infections?
-By studying the sharklet skin pattern that repels bacteria, companies like Sharklet Technologies have created thin films that can be applied to surfaces to prevent bacterial growth without the use of chemicals.
What is the potential impact of biomimicry on the future of sustainable living?
-Biomimicry has the potential to revolutionize sustainable living by providing solutions that are in harmony with nature, promoting beauty, abundance, and reducing regrets, by learning from the millions of species that have developed successful survival strategies over time.
How does the script suggest we should approach learning from nature?
-The script suggests that we should approach learning from nature with humility, as apprentices to the masters, and be open to the idea that the best solutions for a sustainable future may already exist in the natural world around us.
Outlines
🌿 Biomimicry: Learning from Nature's Elders
The first paragraph introduces the concept of biomimicry, which is the practice of looking to nature for sustainable solutions to human problems. It emphasizes that life on Earth has been around for billions of years and has developed efficient strategies for survival. The idea is to learn from these biological elders, as they have already solved many of the challenges we face today. The paragraph highlights the importance of biomimicry as a new discipline that inspires innovation by emulating nature's solutions. It also outlines the principles of life that have been developed over evolutionary time, such as reliance on sunlight, water as a solvent, local expertise, cooperation, and the avoidance of waste and pollution.
🕸 Innovative Materials Inspired by Nature
The second paragraph delves into how nature's innovations are being used to create new materials and processes. It discusses the creation of strong fibers by spiders at room temperature and low pressure, which has inspired manufacturers to look into new ways of producing materials. The paragraph also explores the production of hard materials like the mother-of-pearl found in abalone shells, which is self-healing and benign to manufacture. It mentions the use of carbon dioxide by plants and marine organisms to create materials, which is now being mimicked by companies to produce biodegradable plastics and packaging. The potential for using CO2 to create concrete in a sustainable way is also highlighted, as well as energy conservation through algorithms inspired by ant and bee communication.
🌪 Energy and Water Conservation Through Biomimicry
This paragraph focuses on the application of biomimicry in energy and water conservation. It describes a new type of wind farm designed based on the schooling behavior of fish, which increases energy output while reducing land use. The Namibian beetle's ability to collect water from fog is highlighted as an inspiration for creating fog-catching nets for agriculture. The desalination process used by fish is mimicked in a new type of membrane technology that uses less energy than traditional methods. Additionally, the paragraph discusses the potential of using fungi to help plants grow with less water, which could be crucial in a world facing climate change and drought.
🎨 Nature's Structural Solutions for Color and Cleanliness
The fourth paragraph explores how nature uses structure instead of chemistry to create color and maintain cleanliness. It explains how organisms like hummingbirds, morpho butterflies, and peacocks create vibrant colors through structural color, which is brighter and more enduring than pigmented color. The paragraph also discusses the Lotus effect, where the structure of a lotus leaf repels water and dirt, inspiring new cleaning technologies that do not rely on chemicals. The potential for using structural solutions to create long-lasting colors in products and to develop new cleaning methods is emphasized.
🛡️ Combating Superbugs and Creating Sustainable Conditions
The final paragraph discusses the use of biomimicry to address the issue of superbugs and the creation of sustainable living conditions. It mentions the Galapagos shark, whose skin structure repels bacteria, inspiring the development of antibacterial surfaces. The paragraph also reflects on the broader goal of biomimicry, which is to learn from nature's ability to create conditions that support life over generations. It suggests that by mimicking life's genius, we can create a future of beauty, abundance, and sustainability, with fewer regrets.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Biomimetics
💡Sustainability
💡Chemists and Architects
💡Life's Principles
💡Photosynthesis
💡Cooperation
💡Desalination
💡Carbon Dioxide
💡Self-Assembly
💡Energy Conservation
💡Structural Color
💡Lotus Effect
Highlights
Life on Earth has evolved sustainable practices over 3.8 billion years, suggesting we should learn from these biological elders.
Biomimetics is a discipline that seeks innovation inspired by nature, with professionals emulating natural solutions to human problems.
Species that have existed for millions of years provide the best models for long-term adaptation to Earth's conditions.
Life's principles include running on sunlight, conducting chemistry in water, relying on local expertise, and promoting cooperation.
Nature's chemistry is characterized by using a small subset of safe elements and elegant, low-impact reactions.
Spiders create strong fibers at room temperature and low pressure, an example of nature's efficient material production.
Abalone shells demonstrate nature's ability to produce tough materials like ceramics through self-assembly and benign manufacturing.
Companies are mimicking the CO2 to stuff chemistry seen in plants and marine organisms to create biodegradable plastics and packaging.
Blue Planet is sequestering CO2 in concrete production, turning a harmful gas into a building material.
Regen software mimics ant and bee foraging algorithms to reduce energy demand and bills through smart appliance communication.
A new wind farm design inspired by fish schooling improves energy efficiency and reduces land use.
The Namibian beetle's fog-collecting abilities are being mimicked to create self-filling water bottles and agricultural nets.
Aquaporin membranes mimic nature's desalination process, offering a more energy-efficient alternative to reverse osmosis.
Scientists are learning from plants in extreme conditions to develop agriculture that requires less water.
Structural color, as seen in hummingbirds and peacocks, offers a chemical-free alternative to traditional pigments.
The Lotus effect, inspired by the self-cleaning properties of the lotus leaf, is being used to create non-adhesive surfaces for various products.
Sharklet Technologies mimics shark skin to create surfaces that repel bacteria without the use of chemicals.
The goal of biomimicry is to create a sustainable world by mimicking life's genius and the continuity of life as the definition of success.
Transcripts
[Music]
life's been on earth for 3.8 billion
years and in that time life has learned
what works and and what's appropriate
here and what lasts here and the idea is
that perhaps we should be looking at
these mentors at these biological elders
they have figured out how to create a
sustainable world
so rather than inventing it from scratch
why don't we take our cues from them
it's these are earth savvy adaptations
as a consummate life these these
organisms are the consummate engineers
they're the consummate chemists and
technologists it learned how to do it in
context so that's the core idea behind
bio memory is that that the best ideas
might not be ours you might already have
been invented
[Music]
biomimicry is innovation inspired by
nature it's a new discipline in which
the people that make our world the
chemists and architects material
scientists and product designers they
ask themselves what in the natural world
has already solved what it is I'm trying
to solve and then they try to emulate
what they've learned our work as a
species is to create designs and and
strategies that move us towards being
better adapted to life on Earth over the
long haul and when you when you ask how
to be better adapted to this planet
there are no better models than the
species that have preceded us millions
of years you know there are thirty to a
hundred million species maybe more and
in all that diversity there is a hidden
unity there are a set of operating
instructions how to be an Earthling and
they're their life's principles like
life runs on sunlight except for a few
organisms in sulfur vents at the bottom
of the ocean life runs on current
sunlight we run on ancient
photosynthesis trapped in fossil fuels
life does it's chemistry in water as the
universal solvent and we tend to use
very very toxic solvents like sulfuric
acid life depends on local expertise
organisms have to understand their
places they have to know the limits and
the opportunities of their places and
life banks under
and rewards cooperation life wastes
nothing
up cycles everything and most of all
does not foul its nest does not foul its
home we're a very young species and
probably our best stance as a young
species is to be apprentices to these
masters
[Music]
we need to replace our old industrial
chemistry but with nature's recipe book
our synthetic chemistry is completely
different ten nature's chemistry we use
every element in the periodic table even
the toxic ones and then we use brute
force reactions to to get elements to
bond or break apart life uses a small
subset of the periodic table the safe
elements and then very very elegant
recipes low temperature low pressures
low toxicity that's nature's chemistry
it's a very different paradigm and we
have to ask ourselves not just how to
replace individual molecules for
different kinds of molecules but rather
whole families of reactions it's a big
job to do that but it's it's an Apollo
project worth pursuing organisms make
materials in and near their own body so
they can't afford to heat things up to
astronomical temperatures or to use
toxins or high pressures so for instance
of a spider
it takes what comes into its web a fly
flies into its web it takes that it does
chemistry and water at room temperature
at very low pressures and it creates
this amazing fiber that ounce per ounce
is five times stronger than steel and
this is being looked at now by fiber
manufacturers
nature's also really good at making hard
materials like ceramics if you take the
inside of an abalone shell which is that
iridescent mother-of-pearl that material
is twice as tough as our high-tech
ceramics and what those mother-of-pearl
layers are composed of is just very
simple materials in seawater so what
happens is the soft bodied critter
releases a protein into the seawater
creates a template and on this template
there's charged landing sites and a
calcium and carbonate in the seawater is
also charged and it lands in particular
sites which directs the crystallization
automatic self-assembly crystallization
of this incredible material and and
actually it's a self-healing material
beautiful architecture incredibly benign
manufacturing and people are figuring
out how to make ceramics without ever
using a kiln and this has been looked at
for both reasons for the blueprint and
for the recipe of how you self assemble
out of seawater a hard material
the one thing that we have an awful lot
of is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
and we think of it as the poison of our
era life sees carbon dioxide as a
building block carbon dioxide is used by
plants to make sugars and starches and
cellulose it's used by organisms in the
sea to make their shells and to make
coral reefs and that chemistry that's
co2 to stuff chemistry is now being
mimicked so Nova mer is a company that
takes carbon dioxide and turns it into
biodegradable plastics there's also a
company called new light and their
products called air carbon and they're
taking methane which is an even worse
greenhouse gas and they're using that to
create packaging Dell is using all their
packaging now made out of this air
carbon it's called there are chairs made
from it the first carbon negative chairs
in the world made of this kind of
plastic that comes from co2
[Music]
the most used building material on the
planet is concrete the manufacturer of
concrete produces five to eight percent
of all co2 emissions when you look at a
coral reef which is a concrete like
structure you realize that co2 is
actually sequestered so there's a
company called blue planet that is now
taking the recipe from the coral reef
and they're taking co2 from flue stacks
and they're taking seawater putting
those together and precipitating out the
raw materials for concrete and in fact
they're now able to sequester a half a
ton of co2 for every ton of concrete so
if you can imagine someday us using
carbon dioxide and sequestering it
long-term geological sequestration in
the buildings that are all around us
that's what's exciting about biomimicry
you say to yourself there's existence
fruits that there's another way to do
this
in the arena of conserving energy
there's a software company called regen
and they've studied how ants and bees
communicate to one another in order to
find food sources and and to help
streamline their foraging and what
they've done is they've applied these
algorithms to sensors that they're able
to put on appliances and drastically
reduce peak demand by 25 to 30 percent
reducing energy bills by having these
appliances communicate with one another
and dial down the need for energy at
Caltech students have come up with a new
kind of wind farm that's based on how
fish move in a school so when Fisher are
moving they group together and the ones
in the front as with their cinemas
movements they kind of throw off
vortices these little spirals in the
water and then the ones behind them
curve around those spirals and actually
they get flung upstream saving a lot of
energy so what these students did was
they said why don't we take vertical
axis wind turbines and instead of
spreading them out on the landscape like
you would with traditional wind turbines
why don't we pack them as closely as
possible together and they did this and
they found that when the first axis is
turned they would create these spirals
and the ones behind them would start to
turn even before the wind hit them and
they got ten times more wind power out
of a wind farm this way for a with a lot
less land use
[Music]
one of the things that a thirsty planet
will need is a way to find more fresh
water
the Namibian beetle lives in the Namib
Desert drinks entirely from the fog that
comes in a few times a week it has these
special structures on its wing scales
that condense the water out of fog very
very efficiently 10 times better than
our fog catching Nets this Namibian
beetle effect has been mimicked by many
companies trying to make new fog
catching Nets for agriculture along fog
coasts there's also a small company
that's called nbb nano and they're
creating the fog catching surface along
the inside of a water bottle and
creating a self filling water bottle
that will fill itself with the humidity
in the air life is really good at
filtering especially to recover fresh
water if you think about a fish every
fish in the ocean is a desalination
plant it's living on fresh water in its
cells but it has to create that fresh
water from salt water so it's
desalinating so this this idea of
nature's membranes we even have them in
our bodies we have them in our kidneys
and in our red blood cells and we have
these little pores called aquaporins and
what they do is they actually because of
their shape and their charges they are
perfect for water molecules water
molecules are attracted to the pores to
the channels and then they move through
them very very easily leaving everything
else behind and that's been mimicked in
a membrane with a company a Danish
company called aquaporin and they're
doing desalination membranes that
instead of the energy intensive reverse
osmosis which pushes water against a
membrane they're using the aquaporin
membrane to pull water molecules through
in something called forward osmosis a
fraction of the energy
use and about a hundred times more
permeable than the normal membranes that
we use in our big desalination plants
agriculture is one of our biggest uses
of water and if we can find a way to
grow plants with with less water that's
gonna go a long way for a thirsty planet
what scientists are doing is that
they're looking at places where plants
are growing in extreme conditions and
asking how are you doing that guy named
rusty Rodriguez went to the Yellowstone
hot springs and these hot pools have a
grass growing around them called panic
grass which shouldn't technically be
able to live in those conditions but he
dug down in the roots and he found that
there was a fungal helper wrapped around
the reed that was allowing the plant to
grow in these very hot conditions and he
was able to inoculate seeds with a
fungus that enabled the plant to grow
five times more rice with half the water
use which is really really important if
we're talking about a climate changed
world where drought is the new normal
it's really interesting is sometimes you
are asking yourself how to replace a
chemical and when you look to the
natural world you realize there's a big
paradigm shift because you don't even
need the chemical life often uses shape
instead of chemistry so for instance
paints these are chemical pigments often
we use really toxic materials like
chromium or cadmium in our paints and
the question is can you create color
without chemistry can you create it with
structure turns out that the some of the
most brilliant organisms in the natural
world create their color through playing
with light so structure so this is these
are the hummingbirds in the and the
morpho butterflies and the peacocks a
peacocks feather is has no pigment in it
except for brown all of those colors
that you see are created from very
simple layers that are certain distance
apart and when light comes through it
gets bent it gets refracted it gets
amplified
to create the color blue to your eye or
the color yellow or the color gold all
without chemistry it's just structure
and structural color is four times
brighter than pigmented color never
fades imagine if we were able to create
products where the last few dip coatings
of the surface of the product say a car
would be transparent layers that played
with light in such a way to create a
color no painting no repainting it's
built right into the structure of the
product another kind of chemistry that
we're all always looking for
alternatives to is a better soap a
better way of cleaning without
phosphates and other things in our
wastewater and life also has to stay
clean
imagine a leaf a leaf has to stay clean
in order to photosynthesize so
scientists a couple of decades ago what
lotus leaf put that under a microscope
and found that the way it stays clean
it's not a chemical solution it's
actually a structural solution has tiny
bumps there are certain distance apart
and they're waxy and rainwater balls up
on this surface and dirt particles don't
really adhere they they kind of Teeter
on the mountaintops and the ball of rain
when the leaf tilts picks up those dirt
particles as it rolls off pearls it away
and it's become known as the Lotus
effect so now there's all kinds of
products there's there's a fabrics with
the Lotus effect Big Sky Technologies
does that and and shoulder and there's
roofing tiles Earl estroux f---ing tiles
there's a paint from a company called
stow called Lotus in' and when it dries
it has that bumpy structure so that dirt
really can't adhere and rainwater cleans
the building instead of sandblasting or
applying chemicals and soap so it's a
whole new way of cleaning it's another
one of those paradigm flips that you
often see in the natural world
when you look to nature for for
solutions the big problem of superbugs
in hospitals and the fact that we use so
many antibiotics in order to to battle
bacteria so for instance there's a
company called shark lay they said is
there how does nature manage bacteria
they found this very interesting shark
the Galapagos shark which is a basking
shark that has no bacteria on its
surface even though it doesn't move very
much it has no bacteria on its surface
how is that possible well the shape of
its skin turns out to be something that
bacteria do not like to land on or to
form their films on so by mimicking that
shape sharklet technologies has created
thin films that you can put on doorknobs
and hospital railing bed railings and
and all kinds of surfaces and what it
what the shape does is it acts
really repels bacteria it's a shield
against bacterial infection but it's not
done with chemistry it's done with
structure you know the answers we seek
the secrets to a sustainable world are
literally all around us and if we choose
to truly mimic life's genius the future
I see would be beauty and abundance and
certainly fewer regrets in the natural
world the definition of success is the
continuity of life you keep yourself
alive and you keep your offspring a lot
that's success but it's not the
offspring in this generation success is
keeping your offspring alive 10,000
generations and more and that presents a
conundrum because you cannot you're not
gonna be there to take care of your
offspring ten thousand generations from
now so what organisms have learned to do
is to take care of the place that's
gonna take care of their offspring life
has learned to create conditions
conducive to life and that's really the
magic heart of it life creates
conditions conducive to life and that's
also the design brief for us right now
we have to learn how to do that and
luckily we're surrounded by the answers
and you know millions of species willing
to gift us with their best ideas
[Music]
you
[Music]
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