Variety

Innovations inspired by nature

Chimpanzees help discover new medicines:

One-quarter of modern medicines is derived directly from plants, and there are hundreds of thousands of other plant species, each with dozens or hundreds of unique chemical compounds that could also prove to be of medicinal value.

If you wanted to discover more medicines ,where would you start looking? It could take millions of years, literally, to sort through this enormous variety of plants and plant compounds to find ones with medicinal value. Fortunately, this is exactly what researchers have discovered, that chimpanzees - over millions of years of evolutionary time -have already done.

By observing how chimps and other non-human species cope with illness, researchers have acquired leads on plants with promising medical applications to human health.

Trees from the Vernonia genus, for example, which chimpanzees regularly seek out when ill, have been found to contain chemical compounds that show promise in treating parasites such as pinworm, hookworm, and giardia in humans.

Colour without pigments or dyes, as in forest butterflies

The synthetic pigments and dyes with which we create colour in our paints and plastics often consist of heavy metals that are mined or other chemicals that are toxic to human health and the environment.

An alternative approach to creating colour has recently been inspired by the stunning wings of blue morpho butterflies (Morpho spp.), butterflies of Central and South America that signal to one another in their forest habitats using their iridescent wings.

Their stunning colour is not the result of pigments or dyes. In fact, theres no colour in them at all. Instead, their wing color is a play of light, created by microscopic transparent layers on the wing's scales which cancel out reflected non-blue light waves, while reinforcing blue ones. So-called 'structural colour' is in fact found throughout the natural world.

New cell phone and other electronic displays inspired by butterfly wings are visible in bright sunlight, and use only a fraction of the battery power of conventional displays. Pigment-free cosmetics whose colour comes from harmless structures mimicking those found in nature have also been createdl. And one day, you may be able to change the colour of the walls in your house simply by turning a dial.

Light-but-strong products based on the spiral structures in trees

The new water bottle from a plastic manufacturing company now uses less plastic than any previous plastic water bottle, while being just as strong.

To design the bottle,the designers drew inspiration from spiral structures commonly found in trees, an idea they became aware of through www.AskNature.org, an online database of nature˜s design strategies. Spiralling in trees is thought to improve mechanical performance under compression and tension.

The designers adapted the idea by developing helical structures whose inclination angles vary according to the amount of vertical and horizontal strength needed at a certain surface curvature of the bottle.

The resulting design saves 250 tons of raw material per year and the energy that otherwise would be used to recycle that plastic into new bottles.