Vita Imitare

Well actually yes there is and it’s used to prevent bird collisions. Hundreds of millions of birds die every year from collisions with buildings windows, you may have even experienced this at home. Well scientists have identified a solution from studying spider webs of all things.

After spending hours building the perfect web, the last thing a spider needs is for some bird to mistakenly crash through it. The spiders solution was to incorporate UV-reflective silk strands into their webs. By adding these strands into their webs, which are visible to birds but critically not insects, the spider saves their precious webs from being destroyed by an errant bird.

Copyrighted photo provided by Arnold Glas, ORNILUX

A company (Arnold Glass) created ORNILUX, an insulated glass sheeting that uses a similar UV-reflective coating, which is almost transparent to humans and birds to significantly contribute to bird conservation efforts and our own cleaning bills!

The flashy beak of the playfully over-sized toco toucan, according to the thewritingengineer.com, has a unique ability to regulate blood flow as a solar heat collector during cool periods and as a thermal release mechanism to prevent overheating during hot weather. The dark-colored collector panels of a solar water heating system, veined with pipes circulating heat transfer fluid, serve the same purpose. Engineers are now looking to more closely mimic this design from nature to enhance the efficiency of current designs.

Termites discovered how to keep their internal nest temperature in a range of 1 degree Celsius even though external temperatures can change by as much as 39 degrees Celsius. By looking at how the Termite mounds are created, the design team engineers in Zimbabwe (designed by architect Mick Pearce in conjunction with engineers at Arup Associates) created a building which borrowed the technology of the termites’ nest structure. the result was a building which uses only 10% of the energy of a typical building of its size. Without either  air conditioning or heating systems the building maintains a constant temperature, creating savings of ~$3.5 million in energy costs during the first five years. Buildings account for 40% of human energy consumption, so implementing sustainable design into their structure is paramount if we are to win the battle of energy requirements for our ever increasing population.

Original article by Jock Gilchrist at http://livinggreenmag.com/