During the day, we face a thousand difficulties and do our best to overcome them. Fortunately, we have the internet at hand! We can move every solution we need to our screens with our finger gestures. And then it's simple: open the video, repeat what was done. So imitate the one on the other side of the screen.
From Da Vinci To The Present
Flying represents freedom in many languages and in many cultures. A person who breaks away from nature also has a desire to be free in his genes; he wants to migrate, he wants to explore. And flying has been a UK in man since time immemorial. It is possible to see many attempts to fly in history. From the instrument thought to have flown 200 metres developed by the Greeks in the 400s BC, Abbas Ibn Firnas, Leonardo da Vinci, Sir George Cayley, and the Wright brothers attempted to fly. But attempts to fly with Da Vinci are thought to have taken it a step further. Because according to the findings, Da Vinci created the machine he designed, taking into account the anatomical structure of birds. Probably those before him also tried to fly inspired by birds, but unfortunately we don't have any evidence of whether they did the research. We can take Da Vinci's initiative as the foundation of the field of biomimetics. The Wright brothers, who also made the first successful manned flight, designed their own instruments by studying the anatomy of a pigeon. These are the first imitation attempts in history, and today this area has developed and continues to develop.
Biomimetics can be defined as an effort to solve problems that a person faces in their daily life by taking an example or imitating nature. Because nature has more creative solutions than man! There are millions of different species on the planet that hosts US, and the first goal of each species is to survive. In order to cope with this, they have to evolve different characteristics. Man, on the other hand, is just one of these species and has different characteristics and has to imitate other creatures in nature to facilitate his life. Yes, in fact, in this area of Engineering, which is intertwined with nature, everything works by imitating nature and living things in nature. The problem solving paths followed are the same here: find the problem, observe, find the solution. Of course, the most important item in this area is to make observations, as did The Da Vinci and Wright Brothers.
The Imitation process involves using chemistry to create long-chain chemical structures, molecules, large structures, and mechanisms containing biological characters. Although it developed rapidly between the 1940s and 1970s, it was difficult to follow the procedure mentioned in this area due to technological inadequacies. But by the millennium, things had become easier. In particular, the fusion of biology and synthetic chemistry began to make it possible to form biomimetic molecules using natural and artificial resources. Then, in 2003, British engineer and biomimeticist Julian Vincent discovered that macro technologies could be developed by studying the microscopic world. But no one thought Vincent would deal with sharks.
Natural Solutions
When viewed from a macroscopic point of view, the skins of sharks can be a major contributor to automobile and sporting fields. The biochemical structure of their skin has the ability to reduce friction, which can allow swimmers to swim faster. In addition, if this feature is used in the automobile industry, better performance means less damage. But Vincent approached it very differently, tried to look at it from a microscopic point of view, rather than from a macroscopic point of view, and made a discovery that would make a huge contribution to the field of Medicine. Shark skin is naturally antimicrobial. I mean, it can prevent colonization and infection. But it's not because of a special immune system or amino acid sequences, it's because of the skin's own structure. The skin contains indentations and protrusions, which prevent microorganisms from clinging to the skin. If this feature can be transported from the oceans to the laboratory environment, medical instruments will be covered with these structures and thus serve as disinfectants. Initial tests showed that this structure was extremely successful in preventing microbial binding and colony formation. The team notes that in the following years, the targeted materials will be covered with artificial shark skin.
Every creature in nature has its own movements. But when it comes to birds, we have to keep the range of “movement” wider. One of the birds with different movements is woodpeckers. When the breeding periods come, woodpeckers attempt to influence the opposite sex by hitting their pointed beaks on dry tree trunks. It gets its name from this movement. The explanation is simple. What is difficult to explain is how the brains of woodpeckers who hit the tree 18-20 times per second are not affected by these blows. Because every hit by a woodpecker to a tree causes a footballer to take 100 times more blows than he hits the ball. Imagine if a person tried that shot, it would probably be bait for the decomposers as a result of a concussion! This ingenuity of woodpeckers attracted the attention of two scientists from the University of California Berkeley named Sang-Hee Yoon and Sungmin Park, and they started working on woodpeckers. As a result of long research, it has been found that birds protect their brains from concussions using four different methods. The duo says that the four methods are: their beaks are hard but yawning; their skull bones are spongy; there is a wide space between the brain and skull where there is fluid, and there is a membrane that has evolved to reduce vibration and connects to the woodpecker's tongue. Engineers are considering using these natural structures to produce shock-absorbing instruments, and they have conducted a series of experiments in this direction. According to the results of the experiment, the cylinder-shaped tool produced can withstand up to 60,000 kg of force. Given that the force that woodpeckers are subjected to is 1,200 kg, we can understand how successful the substance produced is. But even this force is not very useful. Researchers are looking to further increase endurance.
Intelligent materials and Nanotechnology
We can have a fever when we're sick. The reason for this is the defense mechanism that the body produces against microorganisms and viruses from outside. So, how does this mechanism understand that foreign organisms enter the body? Finding the answer to this was the key point of the path to smart materials. Proteins from an external organism inevitably interact with the cells of the host creature, that is, us. The host's cells detect foreign protein and begin to show resistance by transferring it to other cells. This resistance is joined by cells specific to the immune system, and the battle with foreign cells begins, and as a side effect of this, the body temperature begins to gradually increase. The same system can be used by cells for many different situations; temperature changes, chemicals, ambient changes, etc.
The key point is the sensitivity of cells to changes and their rapid response to changes. These changes allow cells to survive, allowing us to develop an unlimited number of technological systems, from olfactioners to drugs that hit the target from twelve. One of the most creative examples belongs to Timothy Swager, a professor of Chemistry at MIT, and his team. The team seems to have been so affected by food poisoning and the waste of meat that they found a cure for it. The team created a sensor. Thanks to the creation, we will be able to tell if the meat is rotten without having to smell and taste it. The sensor's operating mechanism is the same as the nasal cells, which means it mimics them. When we smell meat, the bad smells that come to our nose are the chemicals that cause the meat to deteriorate. These chemicals bind to the reception of our nasal cells and introduce themselves to us as a bad smell. The invention of Swager and his friends also detects these chemicals and instantly tells you whether the meat is corrupt with a phone app. In this way, users will be free from poisoning or throwing meat in the trash for nothing.
The development of technology brings new medical applications. The most important of these developments is artificial organ transplants. It's not a very advanced technology yet, but it's only a matter of time before organ transplants sit on the throne. In organ transplants from one individual to another, tissue mismatch is the most important of the problem steps. In artificial organ transplants, this problem is overcome by using artificial tissue produced in such a way that the patient's body and the organ to be transplanted match. But our technology is still inadequate in some cases. The membranes of cells have evolved to protect the organism. It does this by keeping harmful chemicals and substances out of the cell. On the one hand, it has to import the chemicals that the cell needs. In this case, some ducts standing on the cell membrane take over the task, and the necessary substances are taken into the organism thanks to these ducts. This property is called selective permeability. One of the situations where our technology is insufficient is to produce membranes with this property. According to a new study published in April, it may be possible to produce membrane structures with selective permeable properties in a short time. An international team of scientists was able to produce selective permeable membranes using nano-tubes. They placed carbon nanotubes, which they produced on top of the membranes, after giving the necessary amount of energy, they found that these tubes were particularly selective against certain chemicals. Just like the channels in the membranes of natural cells do! The team may have made a revolutionary invention because the most important thing that posed a danger to patients after artificial liver and artificial kidney transplants was that the membranes of the organs were not sufficiently permeable. It is hoped that healthier artificial organ transplants will be performed in the future using this method.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence will be one of the greatest technological advances of the future, although the dangers it can pose to humanity are debated. Work has already begun on computers that write self-programs. If we move away from conspiracy theories and give this technology a chance to develop, the pace of our technology's development will increase even more. This product, which will be perhaps the biggest technological development in a hundred years, is also based on biomimetics. This time, the inspired organism does not come out of the depths of nature. The foundations of artificial intelligence are based on our nervous system.
Our brain is an organ that exists because billions of nerve cells communicate between each other by mechanical and chemical means. As its importance cannot be discussed, it cannot be discussed that it is more complex than other organs, and it is still not fully understood. The breakthrough in artificial intelligence development was first made in 1943 by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. He proposed using nerve cells and neural networks similar to those in our brains in binary computer systems, synthetic ones, of course. At first they were not successful, but in the following years this system began to be developed and formed the infrastructure of many technological products. Currently, work is being carried out with more advanced network systems.
The neural networks in our brain are made up of billions of connections that thousands of nerve cells make to each other. Both chemical and electrical messages are transferred from one neuron to another by the connections formed by nerve cells and travel through our brain! Of course, using these networks to create a human-like technological product will be inevitable. The first to notice this was the Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts duo we just mentioned. So how do the artificial ones of these neural networks work? Artificial neural networks use neuron-like structures that provide stimulation transmission in our brain, and learning is realized through the interaction of these structures with each other. Yeah, don't learn! Because artificial intelligence is based on learning, not coding. But scientists still continue to study biological processes in the human brain to improve artificial intelligence learning and neural processes. For our technology, which is still in its infancy, these studies show great promise.
Although we think that we have moved away from nature by creating civilization, we are still intertwined with nature. We're attracted to him, we're attracted to him. We have to admit, he's far superior to us, and we don't yet have enough technology for some of the solutions he's put forward. Nature finds a way for life to continue, and science finds a way to imitate it!