The Borrowed Nature of Biomimicry

Behind every perfect nature-inspired design is a far more complicated story.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:35Roman Mars?

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• 1:19Roman Mars?

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• 1:55Roman Mars?

  Back in 1989, the engineers of Japan's famous Shinkansen bullet train realized they had a problem. The train was moving so fast that when it went into a tunnel, it basically punched the air out the far end, creating little sonic booms. All across Japan, the Shinkansen was rattling buildings and disturbing residents in the neighborhoods it passed through. An engineering team was brought in to design a quieter and more efficient train, and they had a secret weapon. A.G. Nakatsu, the general manager of the Technical Development Department, was a birdwatcher. As he thought about the redesign, Nakatsu took inspiration from elements of his favorite birds, including owl feathers and penguin bellies.

• 2:41Roman Mars?

  But the bird that inspired the most important element of the redesign was the kingfisher. Kingfishers are famous for the elegant way they dive into the water to catch fish. Their uniquely shaped beaks allow them to break the surface of the water with barely a splash. And so Nakatsu and the Shinkansen design team decided to model the nose of their bullet trains off the kingfisher's beak. And it worked. The new Shinkansen trains were quieter and more efficient.

• 3:11Roman Mars?

  That kingfisher redesign is now seen as a classic example of what's known as biomimicry, the act of looking to the non-human world for solutions to human design challenges. Biomimicry is simply design that is inspired by nature.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Right, and I have to say that stories about biomimicry are catnip to design journalists like me.

• 3:35Roman Mars?

  That is Kurt Kohlstedt, our resident design guy.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Yep, and biomimicry, it's just this really inspiring concept, right? With all these fascinating examples, like the invention of Velcro being inspired by someone noticing how burrs stuck to his dog's fur and to his jacket while he was out on a walk.

• 3:55Roman Mars?

  Yeah, I mean, I love these stories. We love these stories on the show. We've covered biomimicry a lot over the years because the stories are just very catchy. Like, there is something so seductive about the idea of designers borrowing from nature to solve a human problem. It's just a very neat, simple, and just compelling narrative.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. But recently, I've been digging into a bunch of biomimicry stories, and they are not always quite as neat and simple as that bullet train story. The causality is often quite a bit murkier than the headlines would have you believe. And the relationship between nature and human inspiration is often a lot more complicated.

• 4:37Roman Mars?

  Yeah, and that actually makes biomimicry sound more interesting to me, not less. Like, I like that idea of a complex story way better.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree, same here. So today, we're going to dive deeper, go beyond some simple headlines, separate some fact from fiction, and yeah, go into some more nuanced cases.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  But to kick things off and ground us in the concept, I want to start with a relatively straightforward, yet lesser-known example of biomimetic design.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  So this story takes place in the early 1800s in London, England, which was not yet that modern city that we know with its sophisticated transit network or really even basic sanitation. But it was already the largest city in the world and the largest port in the world. And when people needed to cross the city's famous Thames River near that port, they took the London Bridge. But that bridge was notoriously crowded. It was like a choke point for everyday citizens and also commercial traffic, which really burdened people as well as, you know, the city's commerce. And so, over time, it became clear that another crossing downstream was desperately needed.

• 5:53Roman Mars?

  Yeah, that makes sense to me. They needed another bridge.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Totally. Except with the geography of the river and the port and the existing bridge, another bridge would have interfered severely with shipping access. So that solution was a non-starter. And the only real alternative was to tunnel under the river. But this is way before the tunnel to France or even the London Underground. So there was no precedent for tunnels going under active waterways. Tunneling technology, at this point, was essentially an extension of mining technology, right? Dealing with solid rock and soil, but not the undersides of rivers. And so, they tried to use those surface traditional mining techniques to tunnel under the Thames,

• 6:41Speaker 01

  but it ended in disaster, and in some cases, the deaths of workers. And experts eventually came to conclude that this type of tunnel represented an impossible challenge. An engineer named Mark Brunel even wrote that prior attempts, quote, "had so completely failed that he conceived all further exertions on the subject quite fruitless," as in, "it would be pointless to even try." But Brunel was about to have an experience that would completely change his mind.

• 7:12Roman Mars?

  Okay, so what happened?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's best if I let him explain it. So here's an excerpt from a letter that he wrote to his granddaughter later on, recalling his time working for the British Royal Navy. And I'm just going to have you read it.

• 7:27Roman Mars?

  "About the year 1812, being then employed in the dockyard at Chatham, I happened to see before me a piece of condemned timber, a portion of the keel of a ship, wherein the worm, the Toretto navalis, had made many erosions."

• 7:41Speaker 01

  And by erosions, he means tunnels, like tunnels through the wood.

• 7:45Roman Mars?

  Okay, so in modern English, like, he saw a piece of timber that had been worm-eaten along the docks.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. Except that the so-called naval shipworm is not actually a worm. In reality, it's a strangely-adapted bivalve mollusk.

• 8:04Roman Mars?

  Oh, like a clam?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, except specialized for boring holes. And it works like this. Like, its shell has evolved into a pair of grinding plates, and behind those plates trails this long, soft, elongated body that can reach a couple of feet in length.

• 8:24Roman Mars?

  I mean, it sounds terrifying. It sounds something that I would eat eventually at a table as an appetizer.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Hopefully, right? Hopefully, it wouldn't eat you, right?

• 8:32Roman Mars?

  I mean, you put some mignonette on it. You know, like, you scrape it out. It's going to be tasty.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and he didn't go quite that far, but he did pull out a magnifying glass, which is a thing that he was known to carry around, and went in for a closer look. And as he looked, he noticed that the walls of these boreholes that were carved by these worms seemed remarkably stable, even when they were in waterlogged and like rotting chunks of wood from old ships. They were protected. So here's Brunel again from that same letter.

• 9:05Roman Mars?

  "I then said to myself that these little things have made little tunnels. So might we by adopting some corresponding means of protection." I mean, that's basically like the textbook definition of biomimicry. Like, so what did Brunel notice about how the shipworms made their tunnels?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  So the trick that he recognized and then set out to copy was that shipworms do two things at the same time. Even as they scrape out the wood in front of them and move forward into that hole, they extrude a lining that coats and reinforces the tunnel around and behind them.

• 9:41Roman Mars?

  Okay, so while they dig, they also immediately shore up the tunnel around them, which describes basically all excavation. So how is this different from other attempts?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so think of it this way, right? Miners used to working in hard soil could get away with digging for a stretch and then stopping for a bit and then going back and putting up supports behind them. And Brunel recognized that that kind of iterative system just was not going to cut it under the Thames because any gap in space or time between digging and shoring up invited disaster.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  And so with that in mind, in 1818, he went and patented a machine that would work more like a shipworm, digging and then reinforcing simultaneously.

• 10:27Roman Mars?

  So how did Brunel's machine do that?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Well, the crucial piece was what he called a tunneling shield. Basically, it was this massive cast iron frame that was pressed flush against the face of the excavation. And under that shield, you would have dozens of miners chipping away at the front of the tunnel while bricklayers shored up the tunnel behind them. So as the excavation progressed, the shield would be pushed forward and the newly exposed sections were immediately lined with cemented bricks. And so it was all part of this smooth and continuous effort, like the shipworm, tunneling and shoring up behind itself simultaneously.

• 11:05Roman Mars?

  That's so cool.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and really challenging because Brunel had to piece together this system from all these moving parts and people because the technology at the time was not up to making like a machine that could automate all of this, right? It had to be people doing manual labor. And ultimately, it worked. It took a really long time and it did not always go smoothly. But eventually Brunel completed the tunnel spanning over 1,000 feet under the Thames in 1843.

• 11:37Roman Mars?

  And that was the first tunnel built underneath a river anywhere in the world?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, no, like it was literally, pardon the pun, groundbreaking. Nobody on earth had ever made and walked through a tunnel like this before. And it didn't stop there because Brunel's design, that tunnel shield, shaped subsequent tunneling technology. Years later, when they built out subway systems in London and across the pond in New York, they used that same basic tunnel shield.

• 12:07Roman Mars?

  That's so cool.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  And the funny thing is, modern machines have, if anything, converged even more on those mollusks that originally inspired Brunel. Because now we have machines with attachments that place precast concrete panels as the borer tunnels onward. So it is like that all in one thing.

• 12:27Roman Mars?

  Okay, so despite all the setbacks, we are really talking about a very straightforward case of biomimicry, like nature inspiring a human design. A guy sees something in nature, copies it, perfects it, boom, success.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's why I wanted to start here, honestly, because I wanted to ground us in a success story where nature really was this direct inspiration for a human design.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  But there are a lot of other stories that don't perfectly follow that neat, direct trajectory. Stories where the relationship between nature and human design inspiration is not quite so clear cut.

• 13:05Roman Mars?

  Okay, so I'm very excited to muddy the waters a little bit, so what is next?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Well, a different sort of fishy biomimicry with some real twists and strange turns, starting back in 2005, when Mercedes-Benz made a big splash with their Bionic, which was this new concept car that boasted a biomimetic origin story. They claimed their design was the first of its kind to attempt a, quote, "complete transfer from nature to technology," end quote.

• 13:38Roman Mars?

  Well, that sounds like vague nonsense.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 13:43Roman Mars?

  I don't even know what that means.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the argument was essentially that biomimicry usually involves borrowing like a single feature or behavior from an animal, like a bird's feather or a whale's fin. But that their new car was modeled on an entire organism, the boxfish. Here's a picture of it.

• 14:01Roman Mars?

  If you're picturing a boxy fish, because it's called a boxfish, you're right on the money. I mean, like, it is a floating cube with fins.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And it's part of this family of really awkwardly angular fish, including the cowfish and the trunkfish.

• 14:16Roman Mars?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, compared to the naval shipworm, this thing is adorable. I mean, it's like bright yellow with spots on it. But I have to admit, this thing doesn't look aerodynamic at all. Like, this seems like the opposite of an animal that you'd model a car on. So what was the logic behind modeling a vehicle on this boxy shape?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Well, in big picture, you know, the engineers at Mercedes were into this idea of biomimicry, and so they started scouring the animal kingdom for inspiration. And they wondered if a fish, for example, could provide that inspiration for a car design. But cars have to be boxy. There are spaces that house humans, and a long sleek fish is just never going to translate into a functional car. And so if there is a boxy fish that has evolved to be aerodynamic and boxy, that really could be a breakthrough that works all around.

• 15:13Roman Mars?

  Okay, but what made them think that the boxfish was aerodynamic?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it started with some real, serious scientific research that they came across that was being done into the boxfish. In particular, a study being run by a team spanning UCLA, Caltech, and Woods Hole. And so they discovered that there are nuances to the shape of the boxfish that helps stabilize it. Basically, boxfish have these ridges that are called keels that run along their sides, and these help create little eddies, which help them course correct as they swim through the water.

• 15:50Roman Mars?

  Which I suppose is what you want to keep a car running smoothly, like on a highway. It's like you want it to be stable, so that makes some sense.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Precisely. And after reading the peer-reviewed research papers, Mercedes engineers even reached out and called up one of the researchers to learn more about their study. And then they took it a step further and did research of their own. They had drag tests around 3D models of these fish that suggested that despite their squarish face, they were surprisingly streamlined, at least in controlled conditions. And so, in the end, Mercedes designers concluded that the boxfish, for all of its boxiness, represented a, quote, "aerodynamic ideal," end quote.

• 16:33Roman Mars?

  And the Bionic is the car that they built, the Mercedes built.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. They didn't just design it, they actually built it. And here's a picture of what it looks like, right? It's a car which, true to its inspiration, is relatively boxy, as you can see, and it also has these angled ridges along the side that came from the boxfish, more or less.

• 16:56Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I'm looking at a picture now. It is definitely boxy. It's pretty cute. I mean, it sort of looks like a lime green VW Bug with, you know, some more squarish features, kind of like a van bug, you know, kind of?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that's a great description. And honestly, I also think it's pretty cute. And I'm not the only one. When Mercedes put this car out into the world in the spotlight at a big public event, it was a hit. The Bionic design got featured in Nat Geo, it was like installed in the MoMA, and for a while, it was probably the most widely circulated example of automotive biomimicry in the world.

• 17:36Roman Mars?

  Yeah, but I haven't seen one of these, so I'm assuming it never got out of the concept car stage, right?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. There is no commercial car that evolved out of this. The Bionic was really never truly made to go on the roads. It was just a concept car that got a bunch of attention and had a bunch of stories written about it. But you know, like, that, from their perspective, was kind of the whole idea in the first place. Mercedes might not have gotten a commercial car to sell, but they did get this great story that helped associate their brand with being like eco-friendly and cutting edge and tied into this legacy of natural design that had evolved in like the organic elements over the eons.

• 18:19Roman Mars?

  Okay, but so far, this seems like a pretty straightforward biomimicry story.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Well, it would be if the story ended there. And for Mercedes, it basically did. But the fish scientists, like scientists do, kept going. And 10 years after the Bionic's big reveal, researchers with new technologies published new findings that painted a very different picture. The old data wasn't wrong exactly, it was just woefully incomplete. And long story short, it turns out that the boxfish... In its totality is definitely not a quote aerodynamic ideal. In fact, if anything, it's basically the exact opposite.

• 19:04Roman Mars?

  So what did they find out?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Well, the new team led by a biomorphology researcher named Sam Van Wassenberg modeled that blunt boxy front plowing head on through the water. And look, it does do okay aerodynamically as Mercedes had concluded if it's going straight forward. But as soon as the fish turns its head, its aerodynamics are totally destabilized.

• 19:31Roman Mars?

  Which doesn't sound like a great model for a car.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, or definitely not the one they were envisioning because it turns out that the boxfish's superpower is maneuverability, not aerodynamics. And if you actually watch them, they're not straight line swimmers or speed racers. They are these reef fish and they spend their days threading their way through reefs and evading predators. These are animals that need to turn on a dime. So they're super agile and they flick their fins and rotate themselves in three dimensions, which is very cool and totally useful to them. But yeah, it's not what you're looking for in a car. But a car, you want a shape that can travel fast and, you know, run smooth in one direction, even in high winds, just sort of stay on course. And the boxfish, for those purposes, was essentially the worst fish to choose.

• 20:18Roman Mars?

  So the Bionic, it came out, it had a big splash. It was like sent around, I'm sure, online a lot. When the new research came out, did Mercedes respond to it at all?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Oh, no, not at all. And in fact, the Bionic's official webpage still describes the boxfish as having a quote, "highly streamlined body shape."

• 20:39Roman Mars?

  Wait, so they still have a webpage for this thing?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's still up there. It's still like part of their marketing material. It's like the story of this thing was always the point. It was never about whether the car actually worked.

• 20:52Roman Mars?

  So this kind of biomimicry story, would you classify it as more typical than like the Tams tunnel success? Like, is this the type of thing that is mostly what happens when we try to use biomimetic design?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say that, you know, failures are definitely more common than successes. But there's also like other kinds of non-successes, like basically sort of fake stories of having biomimetic inspiration, or at least like vastly simplified ones, right?

• 21:23Roman Mars?

  Right, like just telling a biomimicry story about a product, just so it sounds more interesting.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Exactly, and there are a lot of those. And a classic example is this startup that claimed to have invented a water bottle based on the Namib Desert beetle, which is this insect that has actually evolved a way to capture water out of thin air. It collects and combines droplets on its back and then those trickle down to its mouth so it can drink them. And so these water bottles were, you know, gonna do that same thing essentially and fill themselves up.

• 21:58Roman Mars?

  Right, like, but since I haven't heard of a self-filling water bottle, I assume that that just didn't work.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, it did not actually work. But it did get so much coverage in Wired and NPR and BBC and like the list goes on. They even raised millions of dollars on the backs of those beetles. So yeah, the water bottle, like the Bionic, it was really more about PR than real biomimicry. And honestly, it had less pretensions to even tie to science, I think, than the Bionic did.

• 22:28Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we have one example of successful biomimicry with a tunnel. We had the Mercedes example, which is really, you know, a success in marketing, but not really as successful as product. So what's next?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Something that is honestly a little more complicated and less straightforward than either of those.

• 22:47Roman Mars?

  Okay, we'll get to that after the break.

• 22:55Roman Mars?

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• 24:26Roman Mars?

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• 25:50Roman Mars?

  So we're back talking about biomimicry with Kirk Holston.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  So our final story is about a structural design that you can find basically anywhere in the aerospace industry. If you peel back a panel on a Boeing plane or a NASA shuttle, you'll see an array of hexagons. And these are called honeycomb sandwich panels. They look like and will instantly remind you of beehives.

• 26:19Roman Mars?

  Yeah, so honeycomb panels, I've definitely seen them before. I think anyone who's paid attention to structures at all have seen them before. Were they inspired by bees?

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Well, that seemingly simple question is actually surprisingly difficult to answer because if you think about it, like, people have been admiring and examining honeycombs since ancient times. Like, the earliest written account we have of why they might create hexagonal shapes dates back to 37 B.C. And it was around this time that geometers had figured out that hexagons are one of only three shapes that you can tile continuously and without gaps. There are squares, which of course you can visualize in a grid.

• 26:57Roman Mars?

  Yeah, like our logo.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  And triangles, which like if you, you know, can picture a truss or if you just kind of alternate up and down, you can see those tiling forever, right? And then there are hexagons. And of all that set, hexagons are the ones that give you the most space, as in the most area per unit of edge, which means that if you're tiling an array of shapes, these are the ones that let you use the least material. So for bees, that's more efficient and it makes building easier, but humans benefit from that same efficiency and other structural features, which we'll get to later.

• 27:33Roman Mars?

  So in this case, because this is a super efficient structural solution to lots of problems, bees and engineers, you know, kind of just came up with the same solution. That makes total sense to me.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  But in the midst of the modern era, another contingent came along and saw honeycombs as examples of intelligent design. In the 1800s, one clergyman slash naturalist lauded bees as, quote, "heaven instructed mathematicians," end quote. Darwin actually saw this line of thinking as a big threat to his work, even in the 1850s as he was writing on the Origin of Species.

• 28:12Roman Mars?

  Huh, so why would the bees being good at geometry be a problem for evolution?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Great question. And so basically, if evolution is incremental, right? How do bees arrive at a perfect geometry? Like, what are the steps they take? Because, you know, a slightly off incomplete hexagon isn't a natural step towards making a good hexagon. It's just a bad shape. And so where do we find the in-between versions? And if there aren't any, the natural theological argument goes, somebody or some god must have handed the bees the answer. Also, I suspect there was kind of a gut-level intuition behind all of this. Like, if you look around at the natural world, you see curves and fractals and all these

• 29:05Speaker 01

  chaotic things, but precise angular polygons are pretty weird and rare. And so they seemed just visually like an exception to the norm, right?

• 29:15Roman Mars?

  Right, right. So I can sort of see the argument or why it was complicated. And that was what had Darwin worried?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, in fact, so much so that he actually kept bees to research and experiment on while he was writing Origin. And what he observed is that bees don't build hexagons outright. They actually dig roundish holes that are, well, basically bee-shaped, right? But when a bunch of them do that, you know, in a grid, they end up bumping into each other and as they approach their neighbors, they naturally make walls around those shared edges and that turns into hexagons.

• 30:00Roman Mars?

  Right, so they never really build a hexagon shape? Like, they dig a round hole and you put up some walls for support and they're surrounded by other neighbors who are doing the same thing? And the sides of the circular holes kind of push against each other and flatten out so that you get a hexagon shape?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Exactly, none of which is to say that honeycombs aren't natural wonders. In fact, Darwin was a huge fan. And after he finished his research with these bees, he organized a whole section of Origin around them and their honeycombs, in which he argued that these were amazing examples of the power of evolution. And here's a little excerpt from that chapter.

• 30:39Roman Mars?

  He must be a dull man who can examine the exquisite structure of a comb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration. We hear from mathematicians that bees have practically made their cells of the proper shape to hold the greatest possible amount of honey, with the least possible consumption of precious wax in their construction.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  And you know, there were already all of these connections. But when Darwin published Origin, honeybees and hexagons became stuck together in one of the most popular science books of the century, and were essentially inextricably linked ever since. So when hexagonal panels are created around a century after Darwin, of course, they get named honeycomb panels.

• 31:23Roman Mars?

  Right, right. I mean, you're just naming them after what they look like, you know? Like, that makes sense to me. But in terms of biomimicry, in terms of our subject today, were the aerospace engineers who were using the honeycomb shapes, were they building off of the logic of bees? Or were they building off the legacy of human researchers who came before them?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  I mean, yes, I would say both, all of the above. And I rather dig that ambiguity. Like, there is no simple, straight line from nature to humans. And you know, after 2,000-plus years of honeycomb history, bringing us to the modern aerospace industry, you might think that that would be the end of the story. But I have one last little twist for you.

• 32:09Roman Mars?

  Oh, awesome. Okay, I want to hear more.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in the late 2010s, this 3D printing expert named Druve Bate got to thinking about honeycombs. And he wondered if there was maybe more to them than this platonic ideal of this particular six-sided polygon. So he sought out an expert, an entomologist named Clint Pennick, who was working at an actual biomimicry center at Arizona State. And Clint was shocked to discover that Druve, who had built a whole career on honeycomb structures, had never even seen an actual honeycomb in real life.

• 32:48Roman Mars?

  You know what? I worked in science for a long time. This actually does not surprise me.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah. Because, you know, most engineers, they don't need to bother with bees. They know the shape, right? But Clint sees this, and he starts showing Druve actual honeycombs. And together, they begin to look at how these vary by species. And they observe that real honeycombs are actually quite a bit different from those sort of rigidly repetitive, human-made honeycomb panels.

• 33:17Roman Mars?

  All right. So how did they differ?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Well, the easiest difference is at the corners, at these intersections that are sharply angled in human honeycomb panels. But in nature, often have different degrees of rounding.

• 33:29Roman Mars?

  Yeah. I mean, that makes sense to me because, as Darwin described, you know, like, the bees are kind of making a circle, and it turns into a hexagon. So like, not having other circles around you means that the edges are more rounded.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so Clint and Druve used 3D printing to replicate those curves. And what they found is that they can offer real structural benefits. So ultimately, the pair got massive funding to look even more closely. And they x-rayed and characterized these different combs from dozens of different species of bees and wasps. And they documented all kinds of smaller details, like the variations in the wall thicknesses, and the way that separate comb sections are like joined together. And sure enough, subtler elements of the comb shape were found to improve structural performance with potential aerospace applications.

• 34:21Roman Mars?

  Wow. So like, even in the Suez Age, bees are building better hexagons than we do.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it depends upon the bee and the application. But we are definitely still learning stuff from them, which is crazy.

• 34:32Roman Mars?

  Huh. I love that story. I mean, it makes me think about the, you know, the very simple biomimicry story that we started with, this sort of Kingfisher bullet train story. You know, it's cool, it's easy to convey, but it's pretty flat and flavorless by comparison.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know if I'd go that far, because there's something I really still dig about those straightforward biomimicry stories. But sure, yes, there is something also richer ultimately about ones like the honeycomb story, where you have human creativity and nature ending up in this more complex back-and-forth conversation with one another.

• 35:07Roman Mars?

  Yeah, like a recursive discussion between nature and humans about, you know, the virtues of shapes, I guess.

• 35:14Roman Mars?

  Kurt, this was so much fun. I appreciate this tour through various kinds of biomimicry.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Of course, Roman. Anytime.

• 35:27Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was reported this week by Kurt Kohlstedt, produced by Jacob Medina Gleason, and edited by Emmett Fitzgerald. Mixed by Martine Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Fact checking by Graham Heisha. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lash Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Talon and Rain Stradly, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server, there's a link to that,

• 36:12Roman Mars?

  as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 36:24Roman Mars?

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