Bionic Innovation

An air-jelly-fish or a mechanic bird. The future is here, just watch it unfold #biomimicry

On the recent TED Global 2011 – The Stuff of Life (Edinburgh, Scotland. July 11-15, 2011), it was presented the artificial bird by Markus Fisher, and digging a bit more into it, there is an enormous quantity of projects carried out by ‘Festo’ that mimick life and develop technology with inspiration from nature.

Festo is a leading world-wide supplier of automation technology and the performance leader in industrial training and education programs. Through the Bionic Learning Network, they have been researching and developing projects with biomimicry principles since 2006, and you can see them all on their website.

Biomimicry: Nature as a source for Innovation

 

Biomimetics, Bionics,… to define life-like creativity engineering or nature inspired human inventions.

Those words are relatively new, as they appeared in the last 50 years and since then, they are having an increasing interest and development in those fields. The term ‘bionic’ was coined by Jack E. Steele in 1958 and ‘biomimicry’ in 1982, and was popularized by scientist and author Janine Benyus in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (strongly recommended). Biomimicry is defined in her book as a "new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems". Well, very clear but no so easy. Nature is hiding big secrets and humans take thousands of years to investigate and apply those special tweaks to human inventions. For example, Leonardo da Vinci created the concept for flying machines about 500 years ago but it wasn’t until 1903 when the Wright Brothers, succeed in creating and flying the first airplane, developed by observations of pigeons in flight.

For me, this is one of the most interesting parts of science, as it leads us to a more sustainable future. In addition we support our basis on ‘products’ that have thousands of years of evolution, and give us proof they are working quite nicely. And also we contribute to a better living consuming less resources and generating less waste.

Here you can find some very interesting talks from TED & the Atmoshphere event by Janine Benyus and also Michael Pawlyn designer of The Eden Project talking about Biomimicry in Architecture. And also, Asknature.org is an essential live source created by The Biomimicry Institute in collaboration with the giant Autodesk for collaboration and documentation of how Nature Intelligence solves some of the problems we are facing today. Enjoy!

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Moving Architecture. Video Projections on Buildings.

Buildings are leaving behind their characteristics as permanent still volumes and changing into interactive elements. Human perception shifts to perceive them now more like a TV than a squared sleek facade. That gives them the special effect "in motion" that we didn´t have before, opening the possibilities to a broad spectrum of typologies.

 It seems large scale video projections are becoming lately very popular as an instrument of marketing and a way of attracting attention in cultural events and art hubs. Here is a video projection from URBANSCREEN, a german company dedicated to the production of this special unique pieces of architecture in motion.

You can see one of the videos about their great creations here:

 

555 KUBIK | facade projection from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

AutoCAD WS is available! iPhone and iPad included.

AutoCAD WS is fully available now on www.autocadws.com and they are also releasing compatible applications to be installed on iPhone and iPad  to synchronise all information across devices in what was called before Project Butterfly. With this application you can share blueprints, plans,

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"Straddling" bus. New chinese invention to improve traffic congestion

 

A new type of bus has been presented to apparently solve the traffic problems found in Beijing, China. "The Straddling bus", "The 3D fast bus", or "The Stereo Bus", as they call it, consists of an elevated carriage which moves above cars driving underneath, and guided by two rails on its sides. The bus stops would be

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Wireless Electricity: Witricity

 

Another hit in technology history I just came across on the same day. Witricity is a revolutionary discovery from a group of MIT Physicists who were able to transfer power over distance, basically they were able to light up a normal bulb over a 2 m. distance gap.

Witricity is the website of the company, which has already made a huge progress and has the biggest companies around the world building a partnership to agree a common standard for it.

Interactive Online Video - The future of videos online

 

I just discovered the new invention from a cool Spanish company creating a revolution in the new techonlogies sector. This company is Madpixel, and what they have just launched is the Interactive Online Video, basically a video you can pause at any moment and search interactively through its content. You can click on information about the people that appear in the video, or clothes, objects,... endless joy.

You can see the work they have done for the Principe de Asturias Foundation here in Spanish and also a Demo of a Sex & The City Episode here. And the company website: www.madpixel.es

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