Greetings readers, a very happy new year. In our third theme session, we are going to discuss about surfaces. The year started with big news on functional surfaces. Scientists of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a new process to achieve functional surfaces, this process so far was irreversible (1). This provides a...
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Dear followers, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2017. We will take a holiday break of two weeks and be back with a new theme session in the second week of January ’17. This was an exciting year for us. We celebrated our first year anniversary with a week full of videos,...
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Last month (in November), the Joint Global Biomimicry and Bio Inspired Innovation Conference (aka GBC2016) took place in Utrecht, Netherlands. It is the first time this event is organized in Europe. The event gathered people from all over the world for 2 fantastic days of knowledge sharing and networking. If you want to get a...
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If you have watched The Matrix, you would probably agree that the evil Machines (the Sentinels) who hunt down Neo and other humans in the Real World look terrifying yet oddly familiar. That’s because, in my opinion, the creative directors based the Machines off of insects not just for the appearance but also behaviour;...
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I was thrilled to be invited writing about the ice theme, specifically about the polar bears. I have always considered polar bears the epitome of ice warriors (been always fascinated by Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ novels). Millions of years of evolution equipped the polar bear to survive the extremely low winter temperatures in the arctic...
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Hello to this week’s frosty article. My motivation for this article is to show you the paradox which can appear when you try to solve a specific problem via biomimetics or biomimicry. Sometimes you can draw parallels between properties of already found solutions to other circumstances. These parallels first appear to not have any connection...
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The theme of ice gave me a hard time finding a topic to write about. Being the botanist in our group, of course I wanted to write about plants, which made me think about the challenges plants are facing with ice or snow. In areas of constant low temperature, vegetation is generally pretty scarce. Of...
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The unbelievable fact that frogs can survive the freezing of their own body led me to writing this article in the theme session of ice. Frogs are cold-blooded organisms and their body temperature conforms with their immediate surrounding. This feature would normally prevent habitations of cold climate due to the risk of lethal freezing. Nevertheless,...
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For the theme of ice, I am going to talk about ice itself and how it occurs in nature. Ice is one of the phases of water, almost one tenth of our planet is covered with it. Two large sheets of ice are covering almost the entire Antarctic and Greenland, this amounts to approximately 15 million square kilometers,...
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Dear Blogionik readers, The first theme session is done! It is time for another one. In the next month you will get the chance to read and maybe to write articles about the new theme: ICE During a theme session, you have the possibility to participate on our blog. Maybe you write/wrote a bachelor/master thesis...
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