Mar 15
Designed by German engineering firm Festo, these claw-tipped, artificially intelligent arms were designed to mimic the utility and movement of an elephant’s trunk – but the resemblance to Dock Ock’s writhing limbs is just uncanny.
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Feb 21
If there’s one animal that’s inspired endless scientific research—it’s the gecko. The lizard’s ability to seemingly defy gravity and walk on walls has resulted in robots that can repair spaceships in flight
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Jan 28
To anyone who has ever dropped a wine glass or broken a window, you might have a thing or two to learn from mollusks. A new technique inspired by natural materials such as mollusk shells or tooth enamel can make glass 200 times stronger. Weirdly enough, it works by weakening the glass with microscopic cracks.
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Jan 24
Inventors, designers and engineers are constantly cribbing from Mother Nature, building new-school robots inspired by old-school biology
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Jan 02
In the future, science fiction told us, we’ll be able to save astronauts from the risk of spacewalks with a little robot that can scoot around the ship’s hull, clinging to the surface with some futuristic sticky feet. Well, that robot has now arrived and its name is Abigaille.
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Nov 20
Digital Fabrication Gone Wild!
Posted in: Today's Chili
Experimentation is a pretty standard part of the creative process, but it usually ends with an "a-ha" moment; once you know what you want to make, the trial and error part of the equation is dunzo. For architect Andrew Kudless, however, R&D is never over; he often pushes his sculptural work so far it accidentally ends up in a ten-foot wide puddle of plaster on his studio floor.
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Jul 30
Windows, our source of life-giving sunlight indoors, are a menace to your electrical bill. In the summer, windows bleed cold and in the winter they ooze heat. To save energy, researchers want to give window panes a circulatory system that could pump in cool, liquid relief when they get too hot.
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Jul 30
Some of our greatest inventors have looked to nature for inspiration. So it’s no coincidence that the earliest known designs for what would eventually become the modern airplane were all based on birds. Or why we may one day have nearly indestructible armor
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Jul 03
DARPA’s hummingbird drone
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Jun 18
Biomimicry borrows design solutions from the embedded intelligence within animals’ bodies—chiefly from other species. But occasionally, it also borrows from within the human body. For example, a new study from MIT suggests that buildings of the future could be built with super-strong materials based on the structure of human bones.
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