San Francisco Public Library

Adapt, how humans are tapping into nature's secrets to design and build a better future, Amina Khan

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-330) and index

index present

non fiction

Adapt

bibliography

947146098

Amina Khan

how humans are tapping into nature's secrets to design and build a better future

"Amina Khan believes that nature does it best. In Adapt, she presents fascinating examples of how nature effortlessly solves the problems that humans attempt to solve with decades worth of the latest and greatest technologies, time, and money. Humans are animals too, and animals are incredibly good at doing more with less. If a fly's eye can see without hundreds of fancy lenses, and termite mounds can stay cool in the desert without air conditioning, it stands to reason that nature can teach us a thing or two about sustainable technology and innovation. In Khan's accessible voice, these complex concepts are made simple. There is so much we humans can learn from nature's billions of years of productive and efficient evolutionary experience. This field is growing rapidly and everyone from architects to biologists to nano-technicians to engineers are paying attention. Results from the simplest tasks, creating Velcro to mimic the sticking power of a burr, to the more complex like maximizing wind power by arranging farms to imitate schools of fish can make a difference and inspire future technological breakthroughs. Adapt shares the weird and wonderful ways that nature has been working smarter and not harder, and how we can too to make billion dollar cross-industrial advances in the very near future."--Amazon.com

Part I: Materials -- 1. Fooling the mind's eye: what soldiers and fashion designers can learn from the cuttlefish -- 2. Soft yet strong: how the sea cucumber and squid inspire surgical implants -- Part II: Mechanics of movement -- 3. Reinventing the leg: how animals are inspiring the next generation of space explorers and rescue robots -- 4. How flying and swimming animals go with the flow -- Part III: Architecture of systems -- 5. Building like a termite: what these insects can teach us about architecture (and other things) -- 6. Hive mind: how ants' collective intelligence might change the networks we build -- Part IV: Sustainability -- 7. The artificial leaf: searching for a clean fuel to power our world -- 8. Cities as ecosystems: building a more sustainable society