Biomimicry
Innovation Inspired by Nature
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4.4 • 25 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Repackaged with a new afterword, this "valuable and entertaining" (New York Times Book Review) book explores how scientists are adapting nature's best ideas to solve tough 21st century problems.
Biomimicry is rapidly transforming life on earth. Biomimics study nature's most successful ideas over the past 3.5 million years, and adapt them for human use. The results are revolutionizing how materials are invented and how we compute, heal ourselves, repair the environment, and feed the world.
Janine Benyus takes readers into the lab and in the field with maverick thinkers as they: discover miracle drugs by watching what chimps eat when they're sick; learn how to create by watching spiders weave fibers; harness energy by examining how a leaf converts sunlight into fuel in trillionths of a second; and many more examples.
Composed of stories of vision and invention, personalities and pipe dreams, Biomimicry is must reading for anyone interested in the shape of our future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The natural world, says Benyus (Beastly Behaviors), has an enormous amount to teach us, if only we would "tune in"--as some scientists are beginning to do--before it's too late. Touring the laboratories of a wide array of researchers, she reports on the emerging race to mimic natural processes (hence "biomimicry") in the business-driven quest for better products, environmentally sound technologies and miracle drugs. The scientists speak with palpable excitement, explaining the principles behind a utopian future of unlimited possibilities: energy harnessed by simple, non-toxic molecules modeled on the principles of photosynthesis, so efficient they put the best solar cells to shame; an organic computer, thousands of times faster and more powerful than the most advanced Pentium, that emulates the principles embodied in DNA; farms with abundant yields requiring virtually no pesticides, fertilizers or "energy inputs," mimicking a natural ecosystem-and more. Benyus's shotgun approach can be disorienting, but the possible breakthroughs, the technologies behind them and the scientists themselves are invariably fascinating. And Benyus's observations are engaging as well, bringing to her tech-oriented subject a non-didactic moral framework and an invigorating sense of wonder: "By deliberately looking for creatures that awe us, we may just stumble upon a whole new chemistry--the spoils of survival."
