Seven fabrics inspired by nature: from the lotus leaf to butterflies and sharks | Guardian Sustainable Business With technology poised to change the way we dress in the future, here are seven examples of innovative fabrics that take their cue from the natural world. Hooked on Velcro Invented in 1948, Velcro has become a textbook example of biomimicry – an emerging science that emulates nature to solve human problems. And yet Velcro's invention was something of a happy accident, for which we must thank the dog of Swiss inventor George de Mestral. After a walk in the fields, de Mestral noticed burrs stuck to his trousers and his dog's fur, which led to his creation of a new hook and loop fastening device, Velcro. Exploring the lotus effect Water spilled on a lotus leaf does not wet its surface but simply beads up and rolls off, cleaning its surface from accumulated dust and dirt in the process. Fast-as-a-shark swimsuit Golden Orb spider silk cape Although humans learned to spin silk from silkworms as early as 3500 BC, spider silk was introduced much later, in 18th century France. Nature's genius
Soft tissue found on T. Rex explained The controversial discovery of 68-million-year-old soft tissue from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex finally has a physical explanation. According to new research, iron in the dinosaur's body preserved the tissue before it could decay. The research, headed by Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, explains how proteins — and possibly even DNA — can survive millennia. Schweitzer and her colleagues first raised this question in 2005, when they found the seemingly impossible: soft tissue preserved inside the leg of an adolescent T. rex unearthed in Montana. "What we found was unusual, because it was still soft and still transparent and still flexible," Schweitzer told LiveScience. T. rextissue? The find was also controversial, because scientists had thought proteins that make up soft tissue should degrade in less than 1 million years in the best of conditions. Then, in 2007, Schweitzer and her colleagues analyzed the chemistry of the T. rex proteins.
Les territoires au défi de l’innovation agile Retour sur le Forum des Possibles de Futur en Seine 2014 Dans un contexte de mutation des écosystèmes locaux d’innovation, le 1er Forum des Possibles a proposé le 13 juin au CNAM, à une dizaine d’acteurs de convoquer des possibles souhaitables. Convoquer des Possibles pour les territoires Comment construire sur du temps long à l’ère de l’innovation permanente ? A partir d’un retour de cas en 6 minutes, il s’agissait de formuler des propositions concrètes ou des voeux pour l’écosystème. Des présentations qui invitent, selon Daniel Kaplan, à : travailler le lien entre territoires qui partageraient leurs problèmes à résoudre et inventeraient ensemble des solutions faire durer le plaisir d’entreprendre : pouvoir progresser (agilité, expérimentation) un plaisir collectif changer le regard sur l’innovation & les innovateurs, savoir voir et comprendre, leur donner une chance, notamment en ce qui concerne le financement de l’innovation. Innovateurs et dynamiques territoriales
Cosmic String Time Travel Cosmic Strings are a hypothetical 1-dimensional (spatially) topological defect in the fabric of spacetime left over from the formation of the universe. Interaction could create fields of closed time-like curves permitting backwards time travel. Some scientists have suggested using "cosmic strings" to construct a time machine. By maneuvering two cosmic strings close together – or possibly just one string plus a black hole – it is theoretically possible to create a whole array of "closed time-like curves." Your best bet is to fire two infinitely long cosmic strings past each other at very high speeds, then fly your ship around them in a carefully calculated figure eight. At the moment, these are purely theoretical objects that might possibly be left over from the creation of the universe in the Big Bang. A cosmic string is a 1-dimensional (spatially) topological defect in various fields. Cosmic strings, if they exist, would be extremely thin with diameters on the same order as a proton.
Hagfish Slime: Biomaterial Of The Future? I don’t like to admit that there are many things that are as badass in the marine world as sharks, but hagfish definitely give them a run for their money. Hagfish are primitive, eel-like creatures that spend most of their lives slithering along the ocean floor, scavenging dead and dying fish. They’re spineless, virtually blind, have no jaws and have barely changed over the last 300 million years. They’re not sounding very tough right now, so what makes them so special? Well, hagfish have a sticky trick up their sleeves. Hagfish slime is formed when seawater interacts with two different ingredients secreted by slime glands: mucin vesicles, which rapidly swell and burst in seawater, forming a gloopy net of mucus strands, and threads that are rich in a type of fiber called an intermediate filament (IF). To produce these materials, Benthic Labs intend on inserting hagfish DNA for the filament proteins into bacteria, transforming them into filament-producing factories.
If We Release a Small Fraction of Arctic Carbon, 'We're Fucked': Climatologist This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw "vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor," as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists. But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, has been studying the Arctic for decades. In other words, Box knows the Arctic, and he knows climate change—and the methane plumes had him blitzed enough to bring out the F bombs. Now, the scientists in the Arctic didn't fully understand why the plumes were occurring. First of all, I asked Box if he stood by that tweet. The scientists' video of methane bubbles in the Arctic Ocean.
Innovation sociale et environementale en France Phase Transitions Towards the very early universe... As we move backwards in time towards the moment of creation, prior to one hundredth of a second, the universe becomes hotter and denser until matter actually changes its phase, that, is it changes its form and properties. An everyday analogue familiar to all is simply water. With increasing temperature we see a succession of phase transitions for water in which its properties change dramatically: the solid phase - ice - melts to the liquid phase - water - and then eventually boils to the gaseous phase - steam. You should notice that steam is `more symmetric' than water, which is in turn more symmetric than ice (Can you see why? As we shall see in the next few pages, phase transitions may have had profound implications on the evolution of our Universe and its contents. Unification The basic premise of grand unification is that the known symmetries of the elementary particles resulted from a larger (and so far un known) symmetry group G. Phase transitions
Y Combinator, Move Over For IndieBio: A Second Biotech Accelerator Bernadette Tansey10/9/14 Y Combinator, which set off a whirlwind of skeptical commentary when it opened its highly ranked tech accelerator program to biotechnology startups last spring, now has some company. SOS Ventures, the international VC firm that already holds accelerator programs for software and hardware company founders, is launching a separate accelerator called IndieBio in San Francisco and the city of Cork, Ireland, for entrepreneurial teams in fields that include synthetic biology. Like Mountain View, CA-based Y Combinator, SOS Ventures is betting that innovators in certain biotech sectors—bioinformatics, automated lab technology, and the intensive form of genetic engineering known as synthetic biology—can profit from the jumpstart delivered by accelerator programs. “These accelerators are a third way for people to build their own dreams and secure their own futures,” Gupta says. “None of us are competing,” he says. Bernadette Tansey is Xconomy's San Francisco Editor.
Nasa validates 'impossible' space drive Nasa is a major player in space science, so when a team from the agency this week presents evidence that "impossible" microwave thrusters seem to work, something strange is definitely going on. Either the results are completely wrong, or Nasa has confirmed a major breakthrough in space propulsion. British scientist Roger Shawyer has been trying to interest people in his EmDrive for some years through his company SPR Ltd. According to good scientific practice, an independent third party needed to replicate Shawyer's results. However, a US scientist, Guido Fetta, has built his own propellant-less microwave thruster, and managed to persuade Nasa to test it out. The Nasa team based at the Johnson Space Centre gave its paper the title "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF [radio frequency] Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum". Back in the 90s, Nasa tested what was claimed to be an antigravity device based on spinning superconducting discs.
Projets solidaires et responsables - actualité et témoignages Quels sont les enseignements de la 11ème édition de l’étude “La France bénévole » ? Plus nombreux mais moins réguliers, plus satisfaits mais plus exigeants, tels sont les bénévoles de 2014, qui ont par ailleurs de fortes attentes en termes d’épanouissement personnel mais aussi de gouvernance des associations... L’engagement associatif a été déclaré « grande cause nationale 2014 », mais aux yeux de la plupart des bénévoles français, qui aimeraient plus de mesures concrètes, cette réponse est insuffisante au regard de leurs attentes. Jugeant sévèrement le manque de cohésion sociale en France, ils misent plus que les autres sur la solidarité et les associations pour faire face à la crise, mais ne sont que 13% à estimer que le secteur associatif est bien considéré par les instances nationales (gouvernement et parlement). 41% jugent qu’il est à peu près considéré et 40% regrettent qu’il ne soit pas considéré. C’est l’un des enseignements de la 11èmeédition de “La France bénévole”.
'Huge' Physics Finding Supports Big Bang Theory Scientists announced today (March 17) that they had found the first direct evidence of the dramatic expansion that created the known universe, known as cosmic inflation, or the "bang" in the Big Bang. This dramatic expansion is thought to have occurred in the first instants of existence, nearly 14 billion years ago, causing the universe to expand beyond the reach of the most powerful telescopes. In 1979, a physicist named Alan Guth came up with the theory of cosmic inflation, and theorized that such an event would create ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. But their existence remained hypothetical. Today, a team of researchers said that they had detected these gravitational waves, using a telescope near the South Pole. "This is huge," Marc Kamionkowski, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the discovery but who predicted how these gravitational wave imprints could be found, told Scientific American. Confused, Dr.
Two New Letters for the DNA Alphabet Scientists keep getting better at rewriting the book of life. Adding, deleting, and splicing genes has become routine, and some researchers are now even designing DNA for creatures. While many are hard at work rearranging letters on the page, a new experiment is redefining the concept of synthetic biology by writing new letters. As they reported today in the journal Nature, a team of biologists led by Floyd Romesberg at the Scripps Research Institute have expanded the genetic alphabet of DNA—the As, Cs, Gs, and Ts that write the book of life—to include two new letters. The scientists showed that their letters could be integrated into the DNA of a living creature (an E. coli bacterium) and increase exponentially the amount of information the genetic code can store. “This is a very major accomplishment in our efforts to inch towards a synthetic biology," says Steven Benner, a synthetic biologist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution who was not involved in the study. Failsafe