F: Learning at Mother Nature's Knee

From Fortune magazine:

Learning at Mother Nature's Knee
Designs fine-tuned by billions of years of evolution inspire 21st-century inventions through the science of biomimicry.

Fortune 08/22/05
author: John Greenwald
Time Inc. (Copyright 2005)

NATURAL SELECTION HAS BEEN AT WORK FOR EONS, creating designs that outperform anything humans have yet devised: abalone shells tougher than the hardest ceramic, spider silk stronger than steel, a sea creature called a brittle star that can focus light ten times more sharply than the finest man-made lens. Today researchers are studying such forms in hopes of hatching new products and technologies.
...
It is all part of an emerging science known as biomimicry that studies nature's models and imitates and adapts them for human use.

Nature does it best. I guess we are trying to learn a few secrets from the mother of it all. It does seem like there is a lot to learn.

Technology | Engineering