And the prize for Natures best engineer goes to...

By Roger Highfield 700AM GMT 09 March 2010

Moles are distinguished for their argumentative earthworks

The thought is charming and elementary Mother Nature has been utilizing her own modernized investigate and growth outfit for billions of years, so because not take a root out of her notebook?

That, at least, is the thesis at the back of an online opinion being organized for National Science and Engineering Week by the British Science Association (BSA), to find the temperament of Natures greatest engineer. The shortlist contains the common suspects moles are distinguished for their argumentative earthworks and beavers for their unusual capability to have make have use of of of dams to change the landscape. Then there are the formidable woven nests built by majority class of weaver birds, a small even formulating immeasurable "apartment blocks".

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But there are a integrate of less informed names, too. How about the "snapping shrimp" or "pistol shrimp", a quadruped the distance of your finger with one oversized claw? The shrimp snaps the scratch close with such speed that it releases a peep of light, as well as the pointy enormous sound, from that it takes the name. The sound is so shrill that submarines can have make have use of of of the pole done by shrimp colonies to censor from sonar.

Bugs and creepy-crawlies are additionally unusual engineers. The check includes dung beetles, those dynamic six-legged bulldozers that can pull balls of poo up to 50 times their physique weight, and the diving-bell spider, that has found a approach to live underwater, by trapping air in a woven slot of silk. Then there is the honeybee, that knows a thing or dual about elegant, exquisite structures in 1999, it was eventually valid that a hexagonal grid is the majority appropriate approach to order a aspect in to regions of next to area with the smallest sum perimeter.

Some of the majority appropriate healthy engineers have already desirous us to duplicate them, around the margin of biomimetics. There are copiousness of bland examples, such as Velcro, dreamt up in 1941 when the Swiss operative Georges de Mestral carefully thought about the burrs of burdock that clung to his garments and his dogs hair after a walk. Under the microscope, he saw hundreds of "hooks" that held on anything with a loop, such as fur, and recognized their potential.

Several healthy engineers on the shortlist mount out in this respect. Theres the gecko, that can challenge sobriety utilizing the thousands of hairlike structures, well well known as setae, on their toe pads. The tip of each hair has hundreds or thousands of projections, called spatulae, that magnitude about 10 millionths of an in. across, and can get so close to a aspect that weak, "sticky" interactions in between the molecules in the desk pad and on the aspect spin significant. Dry adhesives formed on this conspicuous outcome are underneath development.

Another contender featured a integrate of weeks ago in New Scientist, where we described how the heart of Africas savannah contains an air-conditioned city with millions of residents a termite cluster right away being complicated as a indication of tolerable development.

If I had to collect an altogether winner, it would be the Atta, ordinarily well well known as the leafcutter ant, that is found in the Americas. Some ecologists guess that the colonies might collect up to seventeen per cent of the sum root prolongation of a pleasant rainforest. However, the ants do not themselves eat the leaves they cut. By requesting fecal droplets seasoned with digestive enzymes, they have make have use of of of the finely cut leaves to have compost for the mildew they grow in subterraneous chambers, that can reach the distance of a football. The smallest ants in the cluster weed the mildew gardens, utilizing antibiotic-producing germ to safeguard their stand stays free from disease.

The achievements of these ant colonies have been hailed as "one of the vital breakthroughs in animal evolution" by Prof Edward O Wilson of Harvard University, who has complicated them for some-more than 50 years. With his co-worker Prof Martin Nowak, Prof Wilson is right away seeking to the ant to answer one of the greatest mysteries of expansion why, when Nature is ruled by presence of the fittest, does she encourage such unusual levels of co-operation?

And Nature can learn us so most more, says Prof George Jeronimidis, a biomimetics consultant at Reading University. He is desirous by the bland e.g. of the tree "We need to find out some-more about the resource by that trees conduct to change large amounts of H2O from the belligerent to the tip over 100 metres, with no pumps."

Such arboreal pumps could lift H2O on to rooftops, and in to communities some-more simply than ever before. The tree of hold up could spin from something visionary and metaphorical to a really genuine thought indeed.

* To opinion in the BSA poll, revisit www.britishscienceassociation.org/naturesengineers

* Roger Highfield is the Editor of New Scientist