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Bulletproof feathers : how science uses nature's secrets to design cutting-edge technology / edited by Robert Allen.

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Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Electronic Resource

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1013/2009037097-b.html

Electronic Resource

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1013/2009037097-d.html

9780226014708 (cloth : alk. paper)

192 p. : chiefly col. ill. ; 22 cm.

Introduction / Robert Allen -- Marine dynamics [chapter title: Marine biology] / Jeannette Yen -- Humanlike robots / Yoseph Bar-Cohen -- Underwater bioacoustics / Tomonari Akamatsu -- Air acoustics / James Simmons -- Cooperative behavior / Robert Allen -- Ventilation / Steve Vogel -- New materials & natural design / Julian Vincent.

"Though they may sound like the stuff of science fiction, in fact such inventions represent only the most recent iterations of natural mechanisms that are billions of years old - the focus of the rapidly growing field of biomimetics. Based on the realization that natural selection has for countless eons been conducting trial-and-error experiments with the laws of physics, chemistry, material science, and engineering, biomimetics takes nature as its laboratory, looking to the most successful developments and strategies of an array of plants and animals as a source of technological innovation and ideas. Thus the lotus flower, with its waxy, water-resistant surface, gives us stainproofing; the feathers of raptors become transformable airplane wings; and the nerve-deadening serrations on a mosquito's proboscis are adapted to hypodermics."--pub. desc.

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