What is a Physicist Doing in the Jungle? Biomimetics of the Rainforest

Abstract

This paper summarizes a TEDx Talk that the European physics professor Ille C. Gebeshuber, who has been living in South East Asia for nearly five years now, gave to a live audience of 800 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in July 2012. A similar talk is also given as an invited lecture at the 4thInternational Conference of Bionic Engineering in China in August 2013. The talk highlights the importance of news ways of doing science and of doing engineering that are needed to successfully address the major challenges humankind is currently facing, and how a generalistic approach synergistically combining Eastern and Western thinking might help in this respect. Biomimetics is stressed as an integrated, generalist way of learning from living nature, and as best practice example for developing new approaches that are based on understanding rather than learning by heart, with memory, reason and imagination as pillars, bridging fields of specialization and of education and thereby blending the knowledge of single isolated scientists and specialist scientist networks to a wisdom of the whole, powerful enough to help us successfully address our major problems.

Textile Pattern Design in Thermal Vision—A Study on Human Body Camouflage

“…Otherwise, the study of the structural colors present in some animals, derived from mechanisms with complex interactions between light and microstructures, have great potential for application in different industrial areas, such as textile [27], being an example the design of a transparent structural colored film, with inspiration in the optical transparency evident in the wings of the insect Cephonodes hylas that allows it to hide from enemies and camouflage in the environment [28], such as examples that link the nanotechnology and study/inspiration in structural color and optical properties present in the wings of the morpho butterfly [29][30][31] and the wings of the Rajah Brooke's birdwing butterfly [32]. In this situation, the structure is a relevant principle for application in engineering, which may enable the creation of new more benign ways of obtaining color [33]. In the modern textile industry and engineering, as explained previously, examples of projects and materials based on the structure are observed, namely: the clothing designed by Donna Sgro with the textile material "Morphotex" inspired by the morpho butterflies; the textile material "FastSkin" from the Speedo brand, inspired by shark's skin; the textile material "Geckskin", inspired by the gecko's feet; the "lotus effect" on textile surfaces, inspired by the lotus leaf.…”

Nanostructural Colouration in Malaysian Plants: Lessons for Biomimetics and Biomaterials

“…It seeks to apply certain principles from biological systems to technological strategies in order to develop innovative applications. The range of potential uses for biomimetics is enormous and in today's society these include architecture and design and surface and materials technologies as well as sensors, medical engineering, and management [72][73][74].…”