Stuck with a Problem? Ask Nature!

I’ve been doing the occasional post under the ‘Technologies inspired by nature’ banner.  But it seems that there is a much better resource that my occasional musings (who knew!!?) the very interesting looking AskNature:

Imagine 3.8 billion years of design brilliance available for free, at the moment of creation, to any sustainability innovator in the world.

Imagine nature’s most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter “filter salt from water” and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels.

Now imagine you can meet the people who have studied these organisms, and together you can create the next great bio-inspired solution.

That’s the idea behind AskNature, the online inspiration source for the biomimicry community. Think of it as your home habitat—whether you’re a biologist who wants to share what you know about an amazing organism, or a designer, architect, engineer, or chemist looking for planet-friendly solutions. AskNature is where biology and design cross-pollinate, so bio-inspired breakthroughs can be born.
 

Basically you can search the free and open source site to find answers to problems that nature has already evolved a solution too. For example: Staying warm when it’s cold. I was going to Ask Nature how to stop runaway global warming, then realised it had a solution – to lock lots of the carbon up in the earth and only release it a bit at a time…Ooops.