Biomimicry and the Built Environment Today we’re going to be talking about the built environment and something called biomimicry. Have any of you heard that word before? By the end of this class/unit/week you will all be experts in biomimicry, or at least on your way I hope… Introduction to Biomimicry for Middle School

So we live in a built environment… Does anybody know what that means? We live in an environment that we humans built around ourselves. Much like these other species that also build homes for themselves [briefly explain each picture]. We often think of ourselves as pretty unique amongst organisms, but in building our environment we’re not. Some organisms build pretty extensive structures, too. Dams made by beavers can effect entire valleys or even river systems, for example. Limestone cliffs can be hundreds of feet tall, and are the result of millions of marine organisms constructing homes around themselves out of calcium carbonate.

Our built “home” is both massive and complicated Our built “home” is both massive and complicated. It’s full of different things like residences, roads, agricultural fields, factories, offices, telephones, schools, etc. These are the things which comprise our built environment. We generally don’t think too much about this. We take our environment for granted. But the world is a lot more interesting when you look around and realize that all of this [gesture around classroom] is created, by us, for us.

Where do ideas come from? But why is it built the way that it is? Today we’re going to talk about where the things in our world come from. A pencil, for example, can you tell me where it comes from? [from a manufacturing plant, transported to stores, made of natural resources like wood from trees and graphic which is mined]. Ok, so that’s where the physical object comes from, but what about the idea for a pencil? Where does that come from?

Where do the ideas come from that people use to fashion all of the objects in our built environment? Like all of these things here. Where did the idea for how to make a bicycle come from? Or a house? Well, people come up with these ideas. Architects design buildings, right? Engineers design bridges, etc. We can call these people designers. They design what’s in our world, how it looks, how it works, what materials it uses, everything.

What we want to know is: where do designers get their ideas What we want to know is: where do designers get their ideas? Because where they get their ideas will tell you a lot about what ideas are even possible for them to come up with. Designers get their ideas from lots of places, of course. Probably the first place designers get their ideas is from the way people have designed things before them. There’s a certain design momentum, if you will. Designers also get their ideas from their imagination, from talking with other people, from doing research on the computer, from reading books, doing experiments, and so forth.

Biomimicry Bio – life Mimicry – to copy or emulate Biomimicry is the notion that we can also get our design ideas from Nature, and that there may be certain advantages from doing this. Bio of course means “life,” while mimicry means “to copy or emulate.” We tend to think of Nature as the source of many things, but we don’t tend to think of it as a source of ideas. [At this point you can ask several students to read what they wrote down at the beginning of class, in response to the question, “What can you get from Nature?” Most if not all responses will be about material resources or recreational values. The point you can make is that we have not been trained to think of Nature as a source of information or ideas]. Learning from nature in order to design things for our world is a very new idea in some ways, but in other ways, we’ve been doing biomimicry for quite some time.

We rarely stop and think about how much of our world has been created from ideas found in nature. In some ways, biomimicry is already such a part of our lives that we often don’t even think about it. We miss that connection completely. Think about fishing nets… spiders thought of using nets to catch prey millions of years ago. Or the beak of a bird… over a billion of the world’s people use a very similar method for eating. And the wheel, that pinnacle of human achievement, was anticipated millions of years before people by a plant, the tumbleweed, which disperses its seeds as it rolls over the ground.

But in many ways, we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of nature’s genius. There are between 10 and 30 million species of organism on Earth. Each of these 10 to 30 million species has its own set of unique adaptations for living sucessfully on earth. And each of these organisms have had to solve many of the same challenges facing humanity – finding food, creating shelter, harvesting energy, transporting materials. Think what we might learn if we “asked” these species the secrets of their success? That’s what biomimicry is all about. It’s a unique and powerful tool to finding solutions to human challenges. Today, we have new tools for exploring nature’s genius than we did in the past; we also have more daunting challenges ahead of us to survive on this planet than probably at any other time in our history as a species. Can Nature help us fit in?

Ok, let’s look at a real, current example. Take the need for cleaners Ok, let’s look at a real, current example. Take the need for cleaners. Humans use tons and tons of detergents every year to clean things. Every one of us in this room is wearing clothes that were cleaned by detergents. Detergents were used to mop the floor of this classroom, clean the desktops, and wipe the windows. Unfortunately, these detergents often contain carcinogens, reproductive toxins, heavy metals and other poisons which get released into the environment, cause cancer, poison waters, and so forth.

But have you ever noticed how things in nature are often so clean? How does nature manage this? You don’t see janitors out there in the woods, dusting off the trees! What if we learned to clean like leaves do, for example? Any idea how leaves clean themselves? [students may respond that leaves are so smooth that water rolls right off of them]. They seem so smooth that water just rolls of them, right? Well, let’s take a closer look…

This is the surface of the lotus leaf you saw in the previous photo magnified many times. It’s not its smoothness at all that keeps it clean. In fact, tiny, tiny bumps on the leaf’s surface are what causes it to remain clean. These bumps cause water to ball up (because the surface tension of the droplets – which pulls the water together -- is greater than the adhesion possible on the bumpy surface of the leaf*). The balls of water then roll along the leaf using an abundant, free energy source – gravity – pulling off dirt particles as they go. Just imagine how we might be able to apply this leaf technology to our world and reduce the need to use toxic cleansers. *[You can go into more detail here, and discuss how the bumps reduce the leaf surface area for the water to contact with, which reduces the hydrostatic force of the water droplet to the leaf and allows the internal cohesive force of water instead to create a droplet] [This is a good place to address part of the Science Content Standard C for Grades 5-8: Structure and Function in living systems. You can emphasize here the relationship between leaf structure (specifically, that the cuticle of many leaves have specialized physical structures – papillose epidermal cells coated with epicuticular wax crystals -- which create a microscopically roughened surface) and function, namely, superhydrophicity, which both prevents water from adhering to the leaf surface where it might support pathogens (e.g., bacteria) and causes dirt to be cleansed away before it blocks photosynthesis or provides habitat for pathogens. You can also further discuss the role of cells, multicellularity, cellular specialization, and disease as a consequence of cellular breakdown in structure and function.]

The good news is, that’s exactly what’s starting to happen The good news is, that’s exactly what’s starting to happen. Biologists have discovered the secret of the success of lotus leaves. And paint manufactures have mimicked the texture of lotus leaves and infused their paints with it; you can literally just roll on a self-cleaning surface. Another application is in fabric finishes, which use the lotus effect to protect fabrics from stains, and reduce the amount of fluoropolymers needed for this purpose. As a persistent organic chemical, meaning it breaks down very slowly in the environment, there has been long-standing concern that fluoropolymers are harmful to people and the environment, so this bio-inspired innovation is a very welcome development.

Biomimicry is learning from nature how to solve human challenges and improve our world. That’s biomimicry. Biomimicry is learning from nature how to solve human challenges and improve our world. [read slide]

[At this point you can explain the exercise the students will be doing for the rest of the week, before you give them the following in-depth example]

OK, let’s see what we might learn from nature about another environmental problem we’re hearing a lot these days about these days: climate change. Can someone briefly explain to the rest of the class what the climate change issue is all about? …

That’s right, human activity is releasing huge quantities of what’s known as “greenhouse gases”, gases like carbon dioxide, which change the composition of our atmosphere and cause it to hold on to more of the sun’s heat than before – like a greenhouse. This then heats up the atmosphere and causes the planet’s climate to change in some pretty dramatic ways. Everything we do from cutting forests to driving cars and running factories adds more and more of these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, so it’s a pretty challenging problem. Emitting greenhouse gases is as common in our society as tying our shoes.

Sometimes you hear people say that there’s no way people are causing something so massive as the atmosphere to change. This is a pretty interesting image. It shows the volume of atmosphere that covers the earth if you collected it all up in a ball, relative to the earth itself. Actually, the atmosphere is not really very massive at all.

When you spread it out, it makes a relatively thin blanket over the earth. If you shrunk the earth down to the size of a desktop globe, the atmosphere would be a thin film of veneer on the globe’s surface. That’s all of the atmosphere we have, and with 6 billion people on the planet buying goods manufactured using fossil fuels, driving cars, clearing forests, and so on, it’s not hard to believe that we can significantly change it. And we are.

Here’s a graph from a documentary called “An Inconvenient Truth” that you may have seen. The red line on the top is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last 650,000 years. Carbon dioxide is one of the main greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and it’s released in great quantities when oil, gas, or coal are burned or forests are cleared. The blue line on the bottom of the graph is average global surface temperature. You can see that temperature is closely tied to carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide goes up, temperature goes up. They follow each other like two people dancing.

And just look where carbon dioxide concentration is now And just look where carbon dioxide concentration is now. See the red arrow? That’s 385 parts per million. Now what do you think is going to happen to temperature? It’s going to continue the dance, right? Incidentally, the top of the red line is the projected levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 50 years. Climate change is real and it is already a very big problem that will affect the rest of your lives as well as your children’s.

? So, let’s put biomimicry to the test. How would nature solve this problem? Can biomimicry help us come up with some innovative solutions to climate change?

Learning from Nature’s Genius: A Step-by-Step Guide What do you want your solution to do? In order to figure out how to get an answer about this, we have to go through some steps. These are the same steps you’ll all be taking this week when you try to solve your own challenges by looking to nature for inspiration, so you probably should take notes on this part. Number one. The first step is for you to figure out exactly what your question for Nature is. You have to figure out what you want your solution to do. Don’t start with what you want to create, or you’ll get yourself off track. In the example about detergents, for instance, if you asked yourself what does nature use for detergents, you’d miss the lotus leaf idea all together, right? Because the lotus leaf doesn’t use detergents; it cleverly uses its surface structure to clean itself. So start with what you want the solution to do. That is, what function do you want the design to perform? So, to address the problem of climate change, perhaps we want our solution to stabilize the climate. That’s what we want it to do.

Learning from Nature’s Genius: A Step-by-Step Guide What do you want your solution to do? Biologize the question. The next step is easy. You need to put your question in a language nature understands, or ‘biologize” the question. So if you want to learn how to clean things in an environmentally harmless way, you might ask, “How does Nature clean things?” To address climate change, you might ask, “How does Nature remove carbon dioxide?”

Learning from Nature’s Genius: A Step-by-Step Guide What do you want your solution to do? Biologize the question. Find the best natural models. The third step is the really fun part. Here you search for organisms in Nature that do the same thing you would like your solution to do (that is, search for organisms that are likely to have ideas for you about how to meet the function you’ve identified in step 1 and 2). So, if you wanted a solution to storing food, you’d search for organisms that store food. Where might you start looking for organisms that store food? What kind of habitat? [The answer you’re looking for might be “places with a winter season”]

Learning from Nature’s Genius: A Step-by-Step Guide What do you want your solution to do? Biologize the question. Find the best natural models. think about habitats That makes sense right? You’d want to look for organisms that have had to meet the same challenge you’re trying to meet. So think about habitats. What habitat presents the same challenge as the one you’re trying to solve. Places with winter mean significant times of the year without food; maybe the organisms in these places have found ways to store food that we could learn from, for instance.

Learning from Nature’s Genius: A Step-by-Step Guide What do you want your solution to do? Biologize the question. Find the best natural models. think about habitats lots of ways to find information There’s lots of ways to search for such organisms. You can search libraries or websites for the information, you could consult with a biologist, or you could even take a walk outside and try to find model organisms yourself. Remember, there’s at least 10-30 million potential answers out there. When you look for organisms to inspire a solution to the challenges I’ll be giving you, I’ll also be giving you information about a bunch of potentially inspiring organisms, so you won’t have to search further unless you want to of course for extra credit, but we’ll get to that later.

Learning from Nature’s Genius: A Step-by-Step Guide What do you want your solution to do? Biologize the question. Find the best natural models. think about habitats lots of ways to find information look for champions In the case of climate change, what organisms can you think of that remove carbon dioxide?...Thinking about habitats doesn’t necessarily help that much in this case, because carbon dioxide is everywhere, right? It’s in the air, it’s in the ocean, and in fact, LOTS of organisms remove carbon dioxide. But you might look at organisms that are highly dependent on removing carbon dioxide for their survival. These are the champions that might have good ideas for us on how to solve our dilemma.

Ok, here are some champions Ok, here are some champions. Trees of course depend on carbon to build their bodies. Trees are massive, right? And about one-half of every tree is pure carbon. Where do you think they get all that carbon? [You can let someone suggest the soil]. Turns out trees get almost none of the their mass from soil, they get it from the air! That’s right. Trees pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They break the carbon and oxygen atoms of carbon dioxide apart and release the oxygen back into the air – what we breathe. [Literally what they do is use rain water to glue the carbon atoms together with hydrogen]. Incidentally, that’s why deforestation – clearing forests – is such a big problem with climate change, because all that solid carbon gets vaporized back into the atmosphere when the trees are cut down.

A lot of marine organisms, like this giant clam, also pull tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They get their carbon dioxide of course out of ocean water, which diffuses in from the atmosphere, and they combine it with calcium that they also get from ocean water to make shells or other hard protective structures. Where trees do this out of thin air, clams do it out of thin water, so to speak. That’s a pretty good trick – I doubt if I gave any of you a glass of seawater and asked you to get a hard rock out of it you could do it, but clams and lots of other marine organisms know how. After millions of years of shells piling on top of each other, hundreds of feet of limestone holding millions of tons of carbon exist in many places around the world. So how clams do this is a trick that might really help us figure out how to get the carbon out of our atmosphere.

Music, unfortunately, doesn’t remove carbon from the atmosphere (in fact it puts it in). But it turns out the way people breathe might indeed hold some answers for us. At first glance, people seem like an unlikely source of inspiration on how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Afterall, people don’t take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, they take in oxygen and put carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, right? But to do that, they need some way of getting the carbon dioxide out of their blood stream. And it turns out that our lungs are very, very good at doing this.

Now we’re going to go into this with a little depth, because I want you to get a sense of the depth you’ll need to have for the presentations that you’ll be doing at the end of the week. Because once you’ve identified some promising organisms to help you solve your challenge, you have to thoroughly get to understand how these organisms do what they do. Afterall, you can’t begin to try and emulate an organism’s genius unless you really understand how it works. So let’s look into how our lungs manage to remove carbon dioxide from our blood so well. Take a breath of air everyone… feels good doesn’t it? You’ll do that 900 times in this class period alone. Our lives are stitched to the atmosphere through our breath. Very simply, this is a diagram of what happens in your lungs every time you take a breath. You take in oxygen, which passes from your lungs into your bloodstream and is used as an energy source throughout your body, and when you exhale, you breathe out carbon dioxide which came out of your bloodstream and is a waste product. Remember, we’re interested in this part of the process, how lungs remove carbon dioxide from the blood, because we’re similarly interested in how to remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere to reduce the greenhouse effect and thus climate change.

Now, the first challenge the lungs have to address is the low concentration of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. Blood has a lot of things in it besides carbon dioxide [red blood cells are stained red, platelettes stained purple, and two kinds of white blood cells stained green and gold]. It has red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, oxygen, digested food, waste products (like urea, lactic acid, and carbon dioxide), proteins, antibodies, and more. Carbon dioxide is a minor player; less than one half of one percent of the blood contains any form of carbon dioxide. Notice that’s very similar to the problem of getting carbon dioxide out of the air. Even at 385 parts per million, that’s still only 385 carbon dioxide molecules in one million, practically a needle in a haystack. Yet somehow our lungs capture carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream with great efficiency and speed, such that about one-third of a liter of carbon dioxide is taken out of the blood and exhaled into the atmosphere every minute, despite its very low concentration in the blood.

To give you some sense of how remarkable an achievement this is, imagine reaching your hand into a jar of, say, 200 white jelly beans, and getting the single red one out. Now imagine that the beans are not sitting still in a jar, but being poured out of the jar, and you successfully grab the single red jelly bean falling passed every single time. Lungs can remove carbon dioxide so well for at least 3 reasons. First, part of the reason our lungs can accomplish the removal of carbon dioxide so well is because of their physical structure. Show me with your hands how big you imagine your lungs are…Right, not very big. What’s that, maybe a cantaloupe?

But despite their small size, they have an enormous surface area [the image is a cast mold of the human lungs]. If you laid out flat the gas exchange surface area of your own lungs, it would be the size of a volley ball court. But it fits into your chest. Talk about efficient packing! Another physical structure worth mentioning that aids in the speed of CO2 removal is the thickness of the walls separating the air in the lungs from the blood in its capillaries. This wall is extremely thin, about one micron thick (1/1000th of a millimeter) or 1/10th the diameter of your hair. So it doesn’t take long for the molecules of CO2 to float across to the other side.

And here’s the lungs’ secret weapon And here’s the lungs’ secret weapon. It’s a chemical called carbonic anhydrase and it’s a kind of enzyme. Anyone know what enzymes do? They speed up chemical interactions. You’ve got all these chemicals bouncing around in your body, but to cause a reaction, chemicals have to bump into each other at just the right angle. Enzymes give chemicals a place to get together in just the right way; an enzyme is like a love couch. Enzymes turn a room full of independent chaotic dancers into a room full of couples doing the waltz arm-in-arm. They turn a bunch of bumper cars into a 2-by-2 motorcade. They speed up chemical reactions.

[Animation of an enzyme] Enzymes give chemicals a place to get together in just the right way; an enzyme is like a love couch. Enzymes turn a room full of independent chaotic dancers into a room full of couples doing the waltz arm-in-arm. They turn a bunch of bumper cars into a 2-by-2 motorcade. They speed up chemical reactions.

Bloodstream Lungs The enzyme carbonic anhydrase transforms carbon dioxide from the form it takes in liquid like blood (carbonic acid and bicarbonate) to the form it takes to cross membranes and mix in a gas (carbon dioxide).

If someone took the carbonic anhydrase out of your bodies, the carbon dioxide would pile up against your lungs trying to get out in a condition called hypercapnia. The symptoms of hypercapnia are disorientation, panic, hyperventilation, convulsions, unconsciousness, and then death. So thank your carbonic anhydrase! It helps your body get rid of carbon dioxide 2000 times faster than we could without it.

Here’s another reason we can thank carbonic anhydrase and our lungs Here’s another reason we can thank carbonic anhydrase and our lungs. Scientists have been studying how this enzyme and our lungs work as a model for developing a membrane that pulls carbon dioxide out of flue stacks before this greenhouse gas goes into the atmosphere, and they’ve discovered that the method works. It makes sense, when you think about it. Like the bloodstream, there is a low concentration of carbon dioxide going through the flue stacks, mixed in with a bunch of other gases, and it’s going by pretty fast. You’ve got to capture and remove it effectively and quickly, before it piles up in the atmosphere. And that’s very much like what carbonic anhydrase and our lungs do in our bodies. That learning from nature to solve human challenges. That’s biomimicry.

It turns out Nature is FULL of good ideas for how to solve human challenges!

So, what does this mean to YOU?

Vitamins based on the diet of forest apes T-shirt that wicks sweat like a horned lizard Vitamins based on the diet of forest apes The sky’s the limit, for example imagine [go through images] Fasteners that stick like burrs Shoe soles that grip like a mountain goat Underwear that breathe like stomates of plants

Clothing colored without dyes like a butterfly or a peacock [You can go into asking the students if they know how these species make their magnificent colors, versus how humans do it. These species create color structurally, by breaking up light waves and selectively reflecting them, like a rainbow or crystal prism. Humans generally create color by using toxic chemical pigments.]

Sandwich bags that biodegrade like tethers of blue mussel and zip closed like a feather

Computers as fast as neurons Energy the way electric eels or leaves make it

Systems interconnected like trees in a old-growth forest

It means that not only can we come up with cool ideas from nature about what to make, we can also learn how to make these things in a more environmentally-friendly way than we have been doing, sustainably, renewably, and with recycled materials, the way nature does… and that’s good for us and the earth.

What possibilities can you imagine? So what possibilities can you imagine? What creatures will inspire you to think of things to create, or new ways to create them? What creatures will inspire you?

Can YOU look to nature for inspiration?

Here are Some Ways to Start Take a Hike! Sit quietly outside and OBSERVE Ask questions in Biology class Stay in School Read books about the natural world Do research on your favorite creature and all its cool functions, for yourself! Go to college and study Biology and Design

Never stop asking Why or How Never stop asking why and how about both the natural and built world around you. Remember, it’s your future that’s being created. You can be a part of it. Biomimicry is one tool that you can use to help make that future better! It’s your future.

Now it’s going to be your turn to try to solve a human challenge by learning from nature… [explain the exercise to cover the remainder of the week]