The winners of the 2014 Biomimicry Design Challenge have been announced. The theme this year was to design something related to transportation. I worked with a couple of students here at Nanyang Technological University, but we didn’t have a large enough team to really produce anything beyond some intriguing ideas about how to rethink air-conditioning for buses (elephant ears? gular fluttering? Dimetrodon sails? honeybee fanning?). But there were a couple other Singapore groups, and one received a prize for their video on demand-responsive bus systems that work like our demand-responsive digestive systems (there could be a bad pun in here about taking some guts to propose something like that, but that would just be tacky).
I also really like the idea of bike whiskers:
Congratulations to all the teams and their bio-inspired innovations!
Ponderings of a Perplexed Primate 