|
Entrepreneurs
of the Natural World Show Case Their Ground Breaking Solutions to the
Environmental Challenges of the 21st Century
Nature’s
100 Best Initiative Publishes Preliminary Findings on How to Green the
Global Economy
9th
Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity 19-30
May
Click
Here for this Article in French
Click
Here for this Article in Spanish
28
May 2008, Bonn/Geneva/Nairobi--A super-small pacemaker modeled on the
wiring of the humpback whale’s heart and pigment-free color coatings
from the light-splitting structures of a peacock’s feather are among a
range of extraordinary new eco-breakthroughs emerging from mimicking
nature.
Other commercially-promising advances,
inspired by natural world and its close to four billion year-old history
of “research and development” include:
-
Vaccines that survive without refrigeration based
on Africa’s ‘resurrection’ plant.
-
Friction-free surfaces suitable for modern
electrical devices gleaned from the slippery skin of the Arabian
Peninsula’s sandfish lizard.
-
New antibacterial substances inspired by marine
algae found off Australia’s coast that promise a new way of
defeating health hazardous bugs without contributing to the threat of
increasing bacterial resistance.
-
Toxic-free fire retardants, based on waste citrus
and grape crops inspired by the way animal cells turn food into energy
without producing flames—the so called citric acid or Krebs cycle.
-
A pioneering water harvesting system to recycle
steam from cooling towers and allowing buildings to collect their own
water supplies from the air inspired by the way the Namib Desert
Beetle of Namibia harvests water from desert fogs.
-
Biodegradable, water-tight packaging and
water-repellant linings for pipes to tents that mimic the Australian
water-holding frog.
These are just some of inventions, innovations and
ideas at the center of a new collaborative initiative called Nature’s
100 Best.
The initiative is the brainchild of the Biomimicry
Guild and the Zero Emission Research and Initiatives (ZERI) in partnership
with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and IUCN-the World Conservation
Union.
It is aimed at showcasing how tomorrow’s economy
can be realized today by learning, copying and mimicking the way nature
has already solved many of the technological and sustainability problems
confronting human-kind. According to Janine Benyus and Gunter Pauli,
co-creators of the Nature’s 100 Best project, “Life solves its
problems with well-adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry, and smart
material and energy use. What better models could there be?”
The Nature’s 100 Best List, a mixture of
innovations at various stages of commercialization from the drawing board
to imminent arrival in the marketplace, is set to be completed by October
2008 in time for the IUCN Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The Nature’s 100
Best book will be published in May 2009.
Today the collaborators and partners unveiled some of
the preliminary projects and products being included on Nature’s 100
Best from an original list over 2,000.
It coincides with the ministerial part of the
Convention on Biological Diversity meeting taking place in Bonn, Germany
where up to 6,000 delegates and over 190 governments are meeting to slow
the rate of loss of biodiversity.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP
Executive Director, said:
“Biomimicry is a field whose time has come. Anyone doubting
the economic and development value of the natural world need only sift
through the extraordinary number of commercially promising inventions now
emerging--inventions that are as a result of understanding and copying
nature’s designs and the superior way in which living organisms
successfully manage challenges from clean energy generation to re-using
and recycling wastes.”
“There are countless reasons why we must accelerate
the international response and the flow of funds to counter rapidly
eroding biodiversity and rapidly degrading ecosystems: Nature’s 100 Best
gives us 100 extra reasons to act and 100 extra reasons why better
managing biodiversity is not a question of aid or an economic burden but
an issue of investing in the non-polluting businesses, industries and jobs
of the near future,” he said.
Janine Benyus, head of the Biomimicry Guild added,
“Biomimicry is science at the cutting edge of the 21st
century economy and based on 3.8 billion years of evolution. Indeed the
way nature makes novel substances; generates energy and synthesizes unique
structures are the secrets to how humans can survive and thrive on this
planet.”
Gunter Pauli, head of the ZERI Foundation based in
Geneva, added: “Steam and coal transformed the 19th Century;
telecommunications and electronics, the 20th Century. We are
now on the edge of a biologically-based revolution and in some of the
inventions show-cased
under this new initiative will undoubtedly be the business models for the
new Googles, Welcomes, Unilevers, and General Electrics of the modern age.
With +one billion Euros already invested in the most important
technologies this is a trend in innovation for industry to follow” he
said.
Humpback
Heart Pacemakers
Over 350,000 people in the United States alone are
fitted with new or replacement pacemakers annually. The cost of fitting a
new device is up to $50,000 per patient.
Enter Jorge Reynolds, Director of the Whale Heart
Satellite Tracking Program in Colombia, whose research is unraveling the
mysteries of how the Humpback’s 2,000-pound heart pumps the equivalent
of six bath tubs of oxygenated blood through a circulatory system 4,500
times as extensive as a human’s.
The work is also pin
pointing how this is achieved even at very low rates of three
to four beats a minute and how the electrical stimulation is achieved
through a mass of blubber that shields the whale’s heart from the cold.
The researchers have, through listening devices
called echocardiographs and via autopsies on dead whales, discovered nano-sized
‘wires’ that allow electrical signals to stimulate heart beats even
through masses of non-conductive blubber.
The scientists believe the findings could be the key
to allowing the human heart to work without a battery-powered pacemaker
and to stimulate optimal heart beats by by-passing or ‘bridging’ dead
heart muscle via special whale-like wiring.
The world-wide market for pacemakers is expected to
reach $3.7 billion by 2010. The new invention could cost just a few cents
to make; reduce the number of follow-up operations because it avoids the
need to install new batteries and thus supplant the traditional pacemaker.
“Resurrection
Plant”
Two million children die from vaccine-preventable
diseases like measles, rubella and whooping cough each year. By some
estimates, breakdowns in the refrigeration chain from laboratory to
village, means half of all vaccines never get to patients.
Enter Myrothamnus
flabellifolia—a plant found in Central and Southern Africa whose
tissues can be dried to a crisp and then revived without damaged
courtesy of a
sugary substance produced in its cells during drought.
And enter Bruce Roser, a biomedical researcher who
along with colleagues recently founded Cambridge Biostability Ltd to
develop fridge-free vaccines based on the plant’s remarkable sugars
called trehaloses.
The product involves spraying a vaccine with the
trehalose coating to form inert spheres or sugary beads that can be
packaged in an inject able form and can sit in a doctor’s bag for months
of years.
Trials are underway with the Indian company Panacea
Biotech and agreements have also been signed with Danish and German
companies.
The development, based on mimicking nature, could
lead to savings of up to $300 million a year in the developing world while
cutting the need for kerosene and photovoltaic fuelled fridges.
Other possibilities include new kinds of food
preservation up to the storage of animal and human tissues that by-pass
storage in super cold liquid nitrogen.
Slippery
Lizard
The two main ways of reducing friction in mechanical
and electrical devices are ball bearings and silicon carbide or ultra nano-crystalline
diamond.
One of the shortcomings of silicon carbide is that it
is manufactured at temperatures of between 1,600 and 2,500 degrees F—in
other words it is energy intensive involving the burning of fossil fuels.
The synthetic diamond product can be made at lower
temperatures and coated at temperatures of 400 degrees F for a range of
low friction applications. But it has drawbacks too.
Enter the shiny Sandfish lizard that lives in the
sands and sandstorms of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and enter a
team from the Technical University of Berlin.
Studies indicate that the lizard achieves its
remarkable, friction-free life by making a skin of keratin stiffened by
sugar molecules and sulphur.
The lizard’s skin also has nano-sized spikes. It
means a grain of Sahara sand rides atop 20,000 of these spikes spreading
the load and providing negligible levels of friction.
Further tests indicate that the ridges on the lizard
skin may also be negatively charged, effectively repelling the sand grains
so they float over the surface rather like a hovercraft over water.
The researchers have teamed up with colleagues at the
Science University of Berlin and a consortium of three German companies to
commercialize the lizard skin findings.
The market is potentially huge,
including in micro-
electronic-mechanical systems where a biodegradable film made
from the relatively cheap materials of kerotene and sugar and manufactured
at room temperature offers an environmentally-friendly “unique selling
proposition.”
Superbugs and
Bacterial Resistance—Australian Red Algae to the Rescue?
70 per cent of all human infections are a result of
biofilms.
These are big congregations of bacteria that require
1,000 times more antibiotic to kill and are leading to an arms race
between the bugs and the pharmaceutical companies.
It is also increasing antibiotic resistance and the
rise of super bugs like methicillin resistant Staphylococcus
aureus that now kills more people than die of AIDS each year.
Enter Delisea
pulchra, a feathery red alga or seaweed found off the Australian coast
and a team including researchers at the University of New South Wales.
During a marine field trip, scientists noticed that
the alga’s surface was free from biofilms despite living in waters laden
with bacteria.
Tests pin
pointed a compound—known as halogenated furanone—that
blocks the way bacteria signal to each other in order to form dense
biofilm groups.
A company called Biosignal has been set up to develop
the idea which promises a new way of controlling bacteria like golden
staph, cholera, and legionella without aggravating bacterial resistance.
Products include contact lenses, catheters,
and pipes treated with alga-inspired furanones alongside mouthwashes and
new therapies for vulnerable patients with diseases like cystic fibrosis
and urinary tract infections.
The bacterial signal-blocking substance may also
reduce pollution to the environment by reducing or ending the need for
homeowners and companies to pour tons of caustic chemicals down pipes,
ducts and tanks and onto kitchen surfaces to keep then bug free.
Beetle-Based
Water Harvesting
By 2025, the United Nations forecasts that 1.8
billion people will be living in countries or regions with water scarcity
and two thirds of the world’s population could be under conditions of
water stressed.
Climate change is expected to aggravate water
problems via more extreme weather events. Many intelligent and improved
management options can overcome these challenges and one may rest on the
extraordinary ability of the Namib Desert beetle.
The beetle lives in a location that receives a mere
half an inch of rain a year yet can harvest water from fogs that blows
in gales across the land several mornings each month.
Enter a team from the University of Oxford and the UK
defense research firm QinetiQ. They have designed a surface that mimics
the water-attracting bumps and water-shedding valleys on the beetle’s
wing scales that allows the insect to collect and funnel droplets thinner
than a human hair.
The patchwork surface hinges on small, poppy-seed
sized glass spheres in a layer of warm wax that tests show work like the
beetle’s wing scales.
Trials have now been carried out to use the beetle
film to capture water vapor from cooling towers. Initial tests have shown
that the invention can return 10 per cent of lost water and lead to cuts
in energy bills for nearby buildings by reducing a city’s heat sink
effect.
An estimated 50,000 new water-cooling towers are
erected annually and each large system evaporates and loses over 500
million litres.
Other researchers, some with funding from the US
Defense Advanced Research Agency, are mimicking the beetle water
collection system to develop tents that collect their own water up to
surfaces that will ‘mix’ reagents for lab-on-a-chip applications.
Notes to
Editors
Nature’s 100 Best is a compilation of 2,100 of the
most extraordinary technologies and strategies that are being mimicked or
deserve mimicking.
The 100 Best List will be launched at the IUCN World
Conservation Congress in Barcelona in October 2008.
At the same time the Biomimicry Institute will unveil
AskNature.org,
an online database of biological knowledge organized by engineering
function in order to engage and inspire entrepreneurs and investors.
For more info:
ZERI - www.zeri.org
Biomimicry Guild - www.biomimicryguild.com
Biomimicry Institute - www.biomimicryinstitute.com
UNEP - www.unep.org
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
- http://cms.iucn.org/
9th Conference of the Parties to the CBD
in Bonn - www.cbd.int
Case studies from today’s preliminary launch and
more details on Nature’s 100 Best at www.n100best.org
Also, for
more information please contact - Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson and
Head of Media, on Tel: 41 79 596 57 37, Fax: 254 2 623692, nick.nuttall@unep.org,
go to: www.n100best.org
or contact:
info@zeri.org
or go to United Nations Environment Program: http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=535&ArticleID=5816&l=en
|
