Really superduper cool session this morning by Tom Daniel and Janine Benyus. Janine talked about the engineering problems that have been solved in nature; Tom talked and showed in detail how he studies bugs. Basically a moth manages to do seriously hard computations about motion and stability when it flies on a windy day and threads its miniscule and long proboscis into a narrow opening of a flower's cup to get at the nectar. How does the moth do the math necessary to hold itself steady in a variable breeze, and correct for the motions of the flower as it blows in the breeze as well? He showed us the processing and the pattern recognition. They built fake flowers and moved them from side to side, or up and down, and filmed the moths correcting for the vertical and horizontal adjustments. They also wired the moths brains and showed the neuron firing. They built a chip they can implant into a moth with which they can actually steer the moths digitally. He talked about flies -- fairyflies -- the smallest supercomputer in the world. A fairyfly is small enough to fit between the eyes of a fruitfly, but it, too, is capable of immensely complex computations. How do we learn about building machines from these guys? How do we even study them?
He was a great example of a larger theme that Janine articulated really well. The big threat, as she noted, is that we have very few interdisciplinary biologists who know about the systemic processes of species at the organism and ecosystem level. Rereading that sentence it's probably too vague. But the storehouses of information about how nature solves problems are often "big" biologists, who know how organisms live, the problems they solve with their bodies and how they build themselves and their environments, and their habitats. But funding is largely moving to molecular biology.
Anyway, it was very cool but now there's a funny quirky twitchy ice explorer talking about global climate. Pictures of outhouses in Greenland at base camp with ice formations entirely covering the toilet (a bad day, he says). Important, entertaining, amazing. Global warming is real, he says.
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