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Originally published on Reuters
When Japanese engineer Eiji Nakatsu was designing the new 500-series Shinkansen bullet train in the 1990s, he was looking for ways to reduce the explosive boom made by the train when it rocketed out of tunnels travelling at 320km an hour.
As well as being an engineer, Nakatsu was a bird lover. And after observing how kingfisher birds slice through the air and dive into the water while hardly making a splash, his team re-designed the train’s nose, shaping it to mimic the bird’s beak. It was an innovation that not only fixed the problem, but allowed the trains to travel 10% faster, and consume 15% less electricity.
It was an example of biomimicry, a term coined by the American science writer Janine Benyus from the Greek bios, life, and mimesis. Biomimicry describes a practice that learns from the strategies developed by living organisms over 3.8 billion years and applies them to solve modern challenges such as sustainable packaging, transportation, energy production and crop production.
As she wrote in her seminal book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, released in 1997: ”Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.”
