Biomimicry

In the past months, I have come across no less than two articles on Biomimicry entitled Nature’s Design Workshop: MSNBC and more recently BusinessWeek (make sure you watch the slideshow).

Researcher Promode Bandyopadhyay has a very interesting quote:

I am against mimicry. I am against making a mechanical zoo. There is no science in that. It is imperative to understand the science first.

Nature is great at finding a solution to a very particular problem within a precise set of environmental constraints. The researcher’s role is to understand how nature’s solution works and to generalize it to other applications. Combine nature’s adeptness at finding efficient, sustainable solutions with our ability for abstract thinking and we get some of the very best engineering around.

For those not familiar with the term, the Biomimicry Institute gives the following definition:

Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new science that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.

Their website has a good introduction to the concept, and a bunch of interesting case studies.

Holophonic sound

Holophonic sound, a demonstration of how you can get surround sound from only two speakers. We only have two ears, yet we can perceive location because they are slightly offset. Our brain compares the input from both ears over time and makes a guess as to how the sound is moving through space. A short sound is harder to locate than a long sound, because for a longer sound we can rotate our head and see the relative change for each ear. By subtly varying the timing and volume of sound sent to each ear, you can fool the brain into thinking it comes from a particular location. I bet the demo above works a lot better with the constant, repetitive sounds they chose than more varied sounds, where changes in volume and pitch might not correspond to changes in location.