The topic of energy storage is more up-to-date than ever. Electric mobility solutions are in need of high-capacity batteries to operate over large distances. The demand for renewable energy sources like wind or solar energy is growing – but those resources are not continuously available. Practical solutions to store energy, available during storms or sunshine...
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Dear readers, we are starting a new theme session, which will be dedicated to “energy storage”. Our focus will be on presenting different strategies in living organisms that nature developed in order to store energy. Types of energy, their purpose and working mechanisms are topics you can expect to read about in the next weeks, based...
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While perhaps far from mainstream science, biological surfaces have received a lot of attention in recent decades, especially by the biomimetic community. In fact, many studies surrounding surfaces have become the prime examples of Bionics/Biomimetics, such as the self-cleaning lotus leaves, the super adhesive gecko pads, etc. In this post, I will be focusing on the...
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Over the last few decades, knowledge transfer from biological concepts to generate technical applications has been receiving increasing attention, often inspiring sustainable biomimetic products in the process. In the past weeks, we have discussed about multiple functional surfaces and how they can be implemented into technical applications. For the theme of surfaces, I will discuss...
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Do you remember that wool pullover from your grandma? Yeah, the heavy one with much more than 2 colors or a very tasteful motive on. It is that one that you only wear once a year when your grandma is there. The itchy one. When you think about this pullover your skin turns red. Several...
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Recently, I watched an old family video that we recorded when we were on holidays in the Mediterranean. To my surprise, the only sound I heard was the unpleasant noise of insects that appear in huge numbers in this area. It does not matter how hard I tried every year to see one, they are...
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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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Dear readers, this is the last topic of three articles about electrostatic fields. In the first one I wrote about strategies for water condensation, and the second one was about natural electrostatic fields on plants. This article is about my own research where I investigated, if plants can actually condensate atmospheric water vapour on the...
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Last week my colleague Jan was writing about sensors. Today I would like to relate to that topic and discuss communication in nature. How do organisms communicate? Human beings for instance rely on verbal communication along with many other channels like hand gestures, behavior, facial expressions etc. Other animals are also using several different methods...
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