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device can extract air from the water. It is dissolved air which contains oxygen and nitrogen and so on. It does not extract oxygen from hydrogen.

2 percent of dissolved air in the water

chimpanzees with intestinal problems
will leave the group and travel to find a particular plant, swallow a
few choice leaves, and recover within twenty-four hours

that animals are selecting plants to treat illness, influence
their own fertility, and even prevent illnesses

We burn 100,000 years of ancient
plant growth every year.

A leaf, for instance, has to stay dirt-free so it can breathe and gather
sunlight. Botanists in Germany looked to the lotus, a symbol of purity
in Asia because it rises from muddy swamps yet remains dry and pristine.
Under a microscope, they saw that instead of being smooth, for easy cleaning,
the leaf surface is incredibly mountainous. Dirt particles teeter on the
peaks instead of adhering strongly, and raindrops ball up instead of spreading
out. As the drops roll, they lift the loose dirt particles, like a snowball
lifting leaves from your lawn. And it's not just lotus: many leaves are
like this. The question then becomes not which detergent to use but how
to keep things from getting dirty in the first place. A German company
called Sto makes a building façade paint called Lotusan based on
the lotus effect. The dried paint has the structure of the lotus leaf,
and rainwater cleans the building. Simple. Wondrous.

A leaf has tens of thousands of tiny photosynthetic reaction centres.
They're like molecular-scale solar batteries operating at ninety-three
per cent quantum efficiency, which means that for every hundred particles
of light that strike the leaf, ninety-three are turned into sugars. That's
stellar in terms of effectiveness. The best part is that these solar cells
are manufactured silently, in water, and without toxins. So plant biologists
and engineers are finally looking to leaves to help them make a smaller,
better solar cell.

organisms don't
use detergent or sandblasters at all, and yet many of them depend on staying
clean for their survival.

We tend to
puzzle instead over how to tweak our conventional solutions

key question for a biomimic

life in ensemble has learned to do is to create conditions conducive
to life

in the process of fuelling up, the
humming-bird manages to pollinate its energy source, ensuring that there
will be nectar next year - for itself, for its offspring, or for completely
unrelated species of nectar feeders.

humming-bird, an organism about
the size of my thumb. It flies up to thirty-five miles an hour (faster
than you can get around most cities in a cab) and migrates about 2,000
miles a year. Those journeying down the eastern flyway reach the lip of
the Gulf of Mexico and then pause for a while, fuelling up on 1,000 blossoms
a day. Finally, they burst across 600 miles of open water without stopping,
on a whopping 2.1 grams of fuel. And that's not jet fuel: it's nectar.

"What would nature do here?"

denizen
of our north-western rainforests, each tree with sixty million needles
that tilt like Venetian blinds to catch the sun and then comb moisture
out of the fog, so that thirty per cent more moisture lands on the ground
around a western hemlock than anywhere else in the forest. The breathing
pores of those needles are deeply embedded, tucked away in the wax, so
the wind can't wick their water vapour away.

Now why is it that a tree that receives up to a hundred inches of rainfall
a year has all those adaptations for drought? It's because there are two
glorious rain-free months in summer, and that's a long, dry time if you're
a tree. So well-adapted species have done the obvious - they've acknowledged
the limits and evolved adaptations for drought, even though they're in
a rainforest.

Ninety-nine
per cent of species that have been on Earth are now extinct because their
products or their processes were not well adapted

Rhino horn surprises us by healing when cracked,
even though the horn has no living cells in it

wood frog that can freeze solid in winter and hop away unharmed
in the spring. Or the much maligned garden snail that builds its own highway
of slime, a lubricant that absorbs 1,500 times its weight in water almost
instantly, allowing the snail to climb up and over a thorny branch without
hurting itself.

every
cell in our bodies is, in a sense, a sophisticated computer, responding
appropriately to signals and information from enzymes, antibodies, antigens,
and so on, that attract or repel one another, that scan one another and
then hook together and self-assemble. Computer scientists are starting
to take note of this, and it may lead to a whole new paradigm for computing,
because what our computers can't do very well right now is pattern recognition,
and what three-dimensional molecules do so well is pattern recognition,
adapting, and learning.

how well adapted a particular
technology is

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year beginning on 1st January,
and today were a breath before midnight on 31st December, it would mean
that Homo sapiens sapiens got here fifteen minutes ago and all of recorded
history blinked by in the last sixty seconds.

Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature, looking to nature as a teacher.

they weren't thinking about how they could use the organisms - they wouldn't
be farming bacteria, or harvesting the barnacles for their glues, or planting
the mangroves to filter water. Instead they would be borrowing the barnacle's
recipe and trying to mimic the mangrove's root membrane design to make
a solar desalination device.

scaling, the build-up of
minerals like calcium carbonate, which they remove with harsh chemicals.
To find a better way, we went walking on a beach with thousands of calcium-carbonate
shells. I described the intricate shell-making process: "Organisms
release proteins into sea-water. These proteins self-assemble into scaffolds
that attract floating minerals, which land in particular spots on the
scaffold and crystallise into shells." Then they asked the obvious
question: "But why aren't shells huge - why don't they just keep
mineralising?" You could have heard a pin drop. I told them that
shelled organisms know how to release 'stop proteins' that adhere to the
surfaces of the growing crystal and stop the growth. They actually stop
the scaling without toxic chemicals. Now that got their attention.

We looked at leaves that were cleaning themselves with microscopic
bumps the way the lotus does, and the engineers thought about how that
would improve the inside of pipes, where sewage build-ups now require
flushing with toxins.

And the Galapagos are extraordinary. This series
of islands came up out of the sea 600 miles west of Ecuador as completely
uninhabited lava cones, until creatures started to raft in on the twelve
ocean currents that converge there. The landmass was smaller than many
of these animals were used to, there was different food, and, most important,
there were many different creatures there that they weren't used to. But
eventually, over a long period of evolution, they knitted together a society.
They tuned themselves to place and placed themselves in community. And
most amazingly, they built soil, cleaned the water, filtered the air,
and sweetened the Galapagos; they created conditions conducive to life,
as life does.

"Why don't
you tell me what it is that's keeping you from purifying water in a sustainable
way, and then we'll go snorkelling to find organisms that are solving
those same problems."

economy that mimics a living system rather
than a machine

mimic the self-opening and -closing hooks on an owl feather, say,
to get a backpack that opens anywhere without the need for a metal zipper.

A deeper mimicry has to do with mimicking not just form, but also nature's
processes and ecosystem strategies.

industrial ecology

Together, life's adaptations spell out a pattern language for survival