Translator: Bill Hsiung Reviewer: Denise RQ
Hi, everyone.
So nature has inspired me from a very young age.
In fact, I hiked miles of nature trails before I could even walk.
My dad had this baby carrier that he'd put me in
and strapped to his back before each trek.
Sitting in that baby carrier, wide-eyed and slack-jawed,
I was in total awe of my surroundings:
the birch trees, the chickadees, the crickets.
When I was older,
we started going on camping trips to New Hampshire's White Mountains.
I remember sitting in the back seat of the car
on the drive up from Massachusetts with my sisters.
And the first of us to see the jagged profile
of the Old Man of the Mountain
would yell, "I spy!"
When we saw his rock face, we knew we were almost to our destination.
A lot has changed since then, but some things remain the same.
Here I am again camping with The University of Akron friends
just a few weeks ago.
The thing is outdoor adventures aren't just a hobby for me anymore;
seeking inspiration from nature is my job.
That's because I study biomimicry.
Bio-what, you ask? Biomimicry.
It's sustainable innovation through emulation
of biological forms, processes, patterns, and systems.
It's based on the idea
that evolution has been vetting strategies for billions of years,
and natural selection tends to favor
high performing, resource-efficient survival strategies.
Velcro, a common example of a biomimicry,
is a non-toxic, glueless, adhesive system inspired by how burrs stick to animal fur.
Now Velcro is everywhere.
How many of you had Velcro sneakers before you knew how to tie your shoes?
Biomimicry can lead to inventions that become everyday tools.
And The University of Akron, in partnership with Great Lakes Biomimicry,
is offering first-of-its-kind, graduate-level training
in this cutting-edge field through its Biomimicry Fellowship Program.
This interdisciplinary program is shattering academic silos.
For example, I'm working
with a team of biologists, designers, engineers, and business people
looking at the biomimicry potential of hedgehog spines.
Why hedgehog spines?
Well, in the wild, hedgehogs are agile climbers.
They scale trees and plants to heights exceeding 30 feet.
And when they need to descend from an above ground perch quickly,
to evade an owl, for example,
they simply roll into a ball like this little guy
and drop to the ground.
And they walked away from these impacts unscathed
because their spines have evolved impressive shock absorbing properties.
These shock-absorbing properties are what first interest me and my colleagues.
The pictures on the right show
what the inside of a hedgehog spine looks like.
Now we're trying to leverage the principles of the hedgehog model
to develop lightweight, material-efficient,
impact-resistant structures.
My colleagues' projects are equally avant-garde.
Daphne, who moved to Akron from Belgium,
studies the UV-reflective properties of eggshells.
Her work is an inspiring development of industrial materials
that don't degrade in sunlight,
and also building envelopes that have high reflectivity,
which keeps the occupants cool and reduces air conditioning expenses.
Bill, from Taiwan, studies structural color in spiders,
especially blue tarantulas like this one.
Structural colors are created by nanostructures
reflecting light in such a way that certain wavelengths are amplified.
And Bill's research is been looked at to create new sorts of paints
that don't require pigments and dyes and that are non-fading and vibrant,
and they don't leach
the harmful chemicals associated with a lot of the other paints we know of.
Sebastian, from Germany, is researching selectively permeable cell membranes.
Cells have channels that allow water but not salt to pass.
So if we can understand how cells filter, we can use those insights
to develop novel approaches to wastewater desalination
and increase the access to potable drinking water.
The biological world possesses a striking depth of wisdom.
It's all around us.
When we need sage advice we ask our elders, right?
So why not ask the oldest mother of all, Mother Nature?
In addition to some of the cutting-edge research
that's going on in The University of Akron labs,
there's also this other part where the Biomimicry Fellows
have an external sponsor.
Some of the Fellows work with companies in their R&D,
embedding biomimicry as an innovation tool.
And other Biomimicry Fellows are sponsored by foundations,
they work in schools or other informal learning destinations
– like zoos or museums – to develop biomimicry curricula.
And so I'm one of those fellows that works with a company.
My sponsor, GOJO, is best known
as being the inventor of PURELL® Advanced Instant Hand Sanitizer.
And I'm proud to work with GOJO because at GOJO,
environmental sustainability is a key piece of that company's culture.
At GOJO, environmental impact evaluations are never an afterthought.
From the earliest phases of new product development,
sustainability is a consideration, all the way through end of life.
And so, it's kind of no wonder GOJO is an early adopter of biomimicry,
since, after all, biological systems epitomize lean design.
One of the first tasks that I was assigned when I started at GOJO
was to lead a biomimicry innovation workshop.
The objective was to develop dispensers for soap and sanitizer,
the kind you see in public restrooms all the time.
And so, we thought about this, and we decided that, you know,
when it gets down to it,
dispensing soap and sanitizer is really just about fluid distribution or movement.
So taking a biomimicry approach,
we asked the question, "How does nature move fluids?"
And we looked at a variety of biological models:
for example the archerfish,
which spits a powerful water jet at fly by insects,
knocking them from the air into the water to eat.
We also looked at trees, which move water and dissolved nutrients against gravity
from roots to leaves using pressure gradients.
This is pretty impressive
when you think about how tall some trees can grow.
And we looked at the heart,
which is a circulatory pump with common walls and multiple chambers.
And so next what we did
is we extracted innovative engineering principles embodied by these models
and we used those principles as ideation stimulus
as we brainstormed novel dispenser concepts.
In total, this workshop resulted in four patent applications,
with two additional in process.
Not a bad return for a small resource commitment.
So, one of the inventions that came of this workshop
was a heart-inspired, double-acting bladder pump.
Like the heart, this pump has separate chambers,
and they're walled off by a central spine with fluid inlet and outlet passages.
The energy from one chamber recovering can be used to compress the other chamber.
So when this is coupled with idealized valving and formulation,
this bio-inspired technology is projecting energy savings of 80%,
which also translates into significant cost savings for the company
because the batteries are actually the heaviest component of the dispenser.
So, if you can reduce the battery power requirements,
you can reduce the weight of the dispenser,
which in turn, reduces freight costs significantly.
We've used biomimicry to tackle
a number of other R&D challenges since this initial workshop.
For example, we looked to nature to invent topical treatments
that both nourish and protect the skin.
And this sort of endeavor had us asking questions like,
"How does nature resist abrasion?"
And that led us to sand-dwelling reptiles.
We also asked questions like, "How does nature cushion?"
And that had us studying elephant feet.
Most recently,
I led a group of 90 R&D professionals on a field trip to the Akron Zoo.
And when we got there, we split into groups,
and in total, we were able to identify more than 200 biological models
relevant to two top priority projects.
And I think what this shows us
is engineers and formulators aren't used to looking to biology for inspiration;
so it seems to really drive outside-the-box thinking.
So, seeing the way that biomimicry has galvanized sustainable product innovation
at GOJO and other sponsors
of the University of Akron Biomimicry Fellowship Program
has been truly eye-opening for me.
I think Biomimicry upends traditional notions of sustainability.
You know, because people tend to think about environmental protection
and associate that with personal sacrifice.
You hear sustainability,
and you think "cutting carbon emissions," or "saving water"
giving up essential things.
But sustainability is not about stifling productivity
or about repressing our impulse to build.
Sustainability is not about seeing the environmental issues
that are facing our society today as economic obstacles,
because really, they are economic opportunities.
In the next 15 years, one report says
that biomimicry could result in 1.5 trillion dollars of global GDP
and additional half a trillion dollars of global savings
associated with reduced resource depletion and pollution.
The future is in our hands.
It's time to rewrite the human narrative, starting right here in Northeast Ohio.
Our region has been villainized for polluting our river so badly
that it caught fire multiple times; but that's in the past.
The past need not define the future.
With The University of Akron and Great Lakes Biomimicry's leadership,
Northeast Ohio is poised to become
a Silicon Valley-like epicenter of biomimicry.
And you don't need to have a PhD or be a scientist to join this movement;
all you need is a healthy curiosity.
Look at this Star Trek-like creature.
He lives just a few miles down the road.
What are his secrets?
What might we be able to learn from his seemingly ordinary caterpillar life?
The answers are in all of our backyards.
To quote the late Yogi Berra, "You can observe a lot just by watching."
Thank you.
(Applause)