In honor of the Portland area's recent heat wave, we'll look at a hot-climate house that mimics a snail for coolness, and the field of biomimicry; at research on the cocoon as a way to improve home ...

How does nature make durable materials like corals without heat or a kiln? How do peacock feathers get their beautiful colors? And how do geckos stick to all kinds of surfaces, allowing them to run up ...

Two local young STEM students recently teamed up to enter the international Biomimicry Youth Design Challenge, researching and developing their own nature-inspired solution to soften San Diego’s hard ...

MAUREEN CAVANAUGH (Host): I'm Maureen Cavanaugh. You're listening to These Days on KPBS. Nature is our oldest teacher, but sometimes we forget it still has some powerful tricks up its sleeve. The ...

Finalists in the Food Systems Design Challenge are creating cutting edge agriculture systems using some of the world’s oldest designs From lab-grown burgers to farms monitored by sensors and drones, ...

“We always learn about nature, but we are rarely taught to learn from nature.” – Jess Berliner Biomimicry encompasses so many different fields of design, manufacture and communication, that it can’t ...

Our biomimicry challenge What Would You Ask Nature? drew dozens of real-world business problems submitted by companies from all over the world. We assigned three challenges to three firms and paired ...

Designers and engineers have often looked to the environment and how Mother Nature has accomplished phenomenal design solutions for inspiration over the ages. Perhaps all that is new about this ...

Janine Benyus helped bring the word biomimicry into 21st century vocabularies in her 1997 book on the subject. Her company, The Biomimicry Group, encourages biologists at the design table to ask: how ...