Random Things

With its 4.5-billion-year head start on mankind, the natural world has developed some clever mechanisms for solving big problems, and that natural cleverness isn’t just informing new ways to generate energy. It’s slowly but surely informing everything from the the way emergency rooms are designed to how data networks communicate. It asks that electricity grids act like bees and businesses manage resources like coral reefs manage calories. Seriously.

“Biomimicry is a beautiful way of framing the design process to be cognizant of how nature does things,” says Dr. John Warner of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry. “I think that over the centuries humans have become a little egotistical in trying to bend materials and things to our will.”

Warner and his colleagues are on the science side of biomimicry’s collaboration between biology and design. As a green chemist, he and his lab develop new environmentally benign materials often borrowing from natural processes along the way. In Warner’s world, gone are the heat, high pressures, and toxic additives native to much man-made chemistry, replaced with processes that hew more closely to the way nature creates materials.

On the other side of that equation are the engineers looking for new and better materials with which to design. And increasingly there’s a stronger dialogue between the two, driven partially by an increased environmental consciousness but moreso by a pressing imperative to solve big, overarching problems at the macro scale.

Take Nocera’s leaf for instance: in light of an always-looming global energy (and environmental) crisis, a means to generate electricity from plentiful (and renewable) water and sunlight could solve a number of huge problems, both natural and man made. The answer is right there in the leaf, and has been for millennia--unlock that natural mechanism in a feasible, economically viable manner and you’ve got a beautiful solution to problems ranging from the environmental to the humanitarian to the geopolitical.

“When you think about the natural world, nature outperforms us in its diversity, in its complexity, but does so at ambient temperature, at low pressures, using water for the most part as a solvent.” Warner says. By helping humans to think more like a leaf (or an ant hill, or a 1,200-year-old oak, or a bacterial colony), biomimicry is tapping that multi-billion-year head start to bring the same kind of complexity and diversity to human invention.

Six examples of how bio-inspired solutions are reshaping the world can be found in this gallery

Porn has been at the forefront of media for centuries. The daguerreotype, the first major photographic technique, was invented in 1835, and only 17 years later an estimated 40 percent of the photos sold in Paris were of nudes. Hot sales of risque books in the 1870s -- more than 100,000 porn stories were bought each year in New York City -- helped the publishing industry take root in America. Porn even decided which type of VCR you owned in the 1980s, after a Sony Beta and JVC VHS tape format battle. (Sony tried to prohibit porn on its tapes, JVC didn't care, and the rest was history.) Which brings us to our century. Video formats have been stuttering online for a decade, but testing and enhancements by porn sites, competing furiously to give users the best viewing experience, helped refine the Internet streaming technology which allows you to watch clips at Hulu and CNN.com now.

So what could happen if Hugh Hefner and friends push porn into TV's third dimension? No one admits to buying a $400 box just to watch sex, but innovation in the erotic arena could intrigue enough that device sales begin to scale. Analysts predict the piddly 3.2 million 3D TVs sold globally last year may grow to 91 million by 2014, but only if enough 3D content is produced to entice viewers. It's no coincidence that the primary demo for porn and tech gadgetry is men in the prime of life. So if your hubby buys a 3D set for the basement, be proud -- he's likely an enthusiastic early adopter

For the iPod Nano

For the iPod Touch

The amazing disappearing concrete block Markus Kison/Flickr

Clever augmented reality applications are becoming the natural byproducts of our modern computers--computers that are tiny, have eyes and other location-aware sensors, and are able to place a synthetic layer of information on our view of the world around us.

The latest is this "invisible" block of solid concrete dreamed up by artists Daniel Franke and Markus Kison. So how does it work?

When a viewer approaches the fixed concrete block mounted at an angle on a pedestal in the middle of a gallery, a rotating cameras on top picks up his/her face and calculates the viewer's exact line of sight. Custom software (written with the visually-oriented openFrameworks platform) then computes the exact angle and composition of the scene being blocked by the cube and projects it onto the face of the concrete. So, if you're aligned properly, you see right "through" the block at the uninterrupted forms of the chair and bench on the other side.

In 1910 Stoss published an essay called "The Wireless Century," intending to predict the world of 2010.  In this world everyone carries around a "wireless telegraph" which:

1. Serves as a telephone, the whole world over.

2. Either rings or vibrates in your pocket.

3. Can transmit any musical recording or performance with perfect clarity.

4. Can allow people to send each other photographs, across the entire world.

5. Can allow people to see the images of paintings, museums, etc. in distant locales.

6. No one will ever be alone again. 

7. Can serve as a means of payment, connecting people to their bank accounts and enabling payments (Japan is ahead of us here).

8. Can connect people to all newspapers, although Sloss predicted that people would prefer that the device read the paper aloud to them (not so much the case).

9. Can transmit documents to "thin tubes of ink," which will then print those documents in distant locales.

Note: This interactive map provides information on national data protection laws that have either been enacted or are currently under consideration around the world. It does not address sectoral laws, local laws, criminal/civil code provisions, or constitutional provisions that may address data protection. It is intended for information only and is not an authoritative statement or summary of the actual laws in these countries, and it may not reflect all recent changes and legislative updates.

The countries with the exclamation marks are those with government surveillance! Includes expected countries like Russia and China but also countries like Singapore, Malaysia and the US!

Two pedals, inches apart, one for gas and the other for brakes. For years, a Japanese inventor has argued that this most basic of car designs is dangerously flawed.

The side-by-side pedal arrangement, the inventor says, can cause drivers mistakenly to floor the accelerator instead of the brakes, especially under stress. The solution? A single pedal that accelerates the car when pressed with the side of the foot. More to the point, when the pedal is pushed down, it always activates the brakes.

“We have a natural tendency to stomp down when we panic,” said the inventor, Masuyuki Naruse, who owns a small factory here in southwest Japan. “The automakers call it driver error. But what if their design’s all wrong?”

Mr. Naruse, 74, is one of a handful of people who have designed combined brake-accelerator pedals in an effort to prevent accidents caused by unintended acceleration, which has come under a spotlight since charges that some Toyota vehicles accelerate without warning.

Regulators in Sweden are testing a single-pedal prototype by the inventor Sven Gustafsson. In Japan, about 130 cars equipped with Mr. Naruse’s pedal, mostly owned by friends and acquaintances, have been declared street-legal, including Mr. Naruse’s own Mitsubishi Diamante sedan. He holds patents for the Naruse (pronounced NAH-roo-say) Pedal in Japan, the United States and six other countries.

Yasuto Ohama, a security company executive whose Toyota Harrier has one of the pedals, said he switched after his foot hit the gas instead of the brakes and he almost struck a bicyclist.

“I can never go back,” Mr. Ohama said. “I now have peace of mind, because there’s no mistaking when there’s only one pedal.”

Within the next two to three years, new Nissans will come with anti-collision radar technology; comfy "easy chair" seats designed by NASA, which are intended to improve blood flow; and air conditioners that spritz passengers with vitamin C, which helps prevent skin damage and wrinkles.

They will also have air purifiers designed by Sharp and smart speedometers that will remind drivers of upcoming anniversaries and birthdays, lest the driver forget.