Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action  

TED has a new talk from Janine Benyus, promoting biomimicry based design - Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action.

Janine Benyus has a message for inventors: When solving a design problem, look to nature first. There you'll find inspired designs for making things waterproof, aerodynamic, solar-powered and more. Here she reveals dozens of new products that take their cue from nature with spectacular results.

(Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 17:42)

One company I hadn't heard of before that was mentioned in the talk is a collaboration between Benyus and Paul Hawken called "OneSun", though I haven't been able to find anything about it online, other than an indirect reference in the Harvard Business Review that talks about a solar panel which "imitates a leaf" and an announcement at the Clinton Global Initiative in September. She also mentioned her "Ask Nature" initiative (mentioned below) and EO Wilson's "Encyclopedia Of Life".

Paul Hawken, one of the first green entrepreneurs and environmental capitalists, is working with Benyus on an interesting new venture. They're looking at Benyus' database of 2,100 nature-themed technologies invented by biologists and winnowing it down to handful that have tremendous commercial potential to solve important problems. (You can peruse a great deal of this knowledge free at asknature.org.) They couldn't provide too many details for intellectual property reasons, but they have a new design for a solar panel which imitates the way a leaf uses the sun's energy. As opposed to regular solar panel production, which is extremely hi-tech and requires clean rooms and lots of energy, Hawken says they have found a new, cheaper way using materials found in every home in the country. President Clinton will be announcing something about this at the next Clinton Global Initiative meeting in September — so watch this space.