Jackfruit Hullaballoo

When jackfruit trees growing on coffee and tea plantations in Coorg bear ripe fruit, the owners quickly strip the trees of their bounty and bury it deep. If they don’t do this, the plantations are likely to receive unusual, four-legged visitors trampling through the neat coffee and tea bushes: wild elephants from the surrounding forests, which love ripe jackfruits and can smell them from miles away

Nature has spent approximately 3.8 million years perfecting the designs of the millions of species that inhabit the Earth to suit the different environments they live in. Now, observant scientists are looking at nature and copying its innovative mechanisms to create better technology. ‘Biomimicry’ is a pretty new field of science in which biologists work hand-inhand with product designers to make things inspired by animals, plants and insects. Janine Benyus, a biomimicry expert, explains that it is “the process of learning from nature and adapting that knowledge to new technology. It takes effort and science”. While this may not be an easy thing to do, it is indeed possible. Let’s take a closer look at how nature has sparked off a bunch of ingenious products.

Non-sticky Dosas

Most of us love our dosas – masala, plain or otherwise. But when I was a kid, my mother used to have a raging battle with the dosa whenever she tried to make it. She would hold the tawa (pan) with tongs, and with immense force, pry the stuck dosa off the tawa. We mostly ended up eating dosas-in-tatters.

And then my mother got a gift – a nonstick tawa. Then we ate dosas that came off the pan in perfectly neat circles. Sound magical? Well, the magic was really in the Teflon coating on the tawa – nothing stuck to it!

Bots versus Us

Can you read the words in the image below? There’s ‘mouth’, ‘drop’, ‘blade’, ‘hair’ and ‘shoe’.

Pretty easy to read, right? Well, that’s because you are human and not a bot! Short for ‘robot’, bots are pieces of code/software, which are designed to steal passwords and personal information and spam computers. They are hired out by their programmers for a price and are sneakily introduced into computers without the owners’ knowledge.