Biomimicry

"Animal Dynamics, a company formed of biomechanics from the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology, islooking to break the human-powered water speed record in a canoe propelled by an underwater fin, mimicking the way that dolphins or whales swim. The team believes that a flapping fin design could be a more efficient than a traditional propeller mechanism, as it works with the natural flow of water, rather than against it. Instead of using paddles, the catamaran-style canoe has a hydrofoil under its bow which is operated by a driver using a pedaling system. The cycling motion drives a fin downwards through the water, creating the thrust to propel the canoe forwards."

"A new bio-inspired method of harvesting energy from the ocean has completed its shakedown on land, and now it’s finally ready for its first real test offshore. Called bioWAVE, the wave energy device won’t be venturing too far — Port Fairy in Australia is as far as it’s going — but we can hardly contain our excitement because we’ve been waiting 7 years for this moment."

"NASA has chosen its next batch of proposals under its advanced concepts program, including the use of soft-robotic rovers for exploring gas-giant moons, and autonomous robots capable of crawling, hopping, and rolling around the surface of the Moon. [...] One of the more interesting proposals calls for a soft robotic squid/eel hybrid. The device would be equipped with a short antenna on its back to draw power from changing magnetic fields. The aquatic rover could be used to explore the subsurface oceans on Europa and Enceladus."

"Surgeries might be easier and safer due to a new invention by researchers from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Italy, a robotic arm that was inspired by tentacles of an octopus. 

The robotic arm device moves by using its inflatable chambers, imitating the natural motion of an octopus twisting and elongating its tentacles in any direction it desires."

"Most of us were born and will die a certain color, but octopuses are masters of their hue, changing from transparent to shades of red, pink, purple and blue by stretching and relaxing their skin. If we could unlock their secret and wrap our buildings in octopus skin, then city skylines might shimmer a spectrum of colors and opacities as the sun waxed and waned."

"Another incredible adaptive animal and insect feature is the development of protective scales that provide insulation, and serve as a camouflage to ward off predators. In fact, animal scale functioning is so impressive that recently “dermal modification” — or the adaptive properties of animal skins — has inspired the scientific development of human armor using 3D printing."

"In 2005, Mercedes-Benz revealed a concept car with a strange shape. Called the Bionic, the cartoonishly snub-nosed vehicle was modeled after Ostracion cubicus, the yellow boxfish. Car manufacturers aren’t the only ones to take inspiration from this weird coral dweller. But researchers now say engineers who mimicked the boxfish might have been misled."

"Cephalopods are curious creatures, able to flex their bodies into nifty shapes and camouflage themselves from sight. Unsurprisingly, they have also been inspiring biomimicry-led designs for years because of this. This month a paper to be published in Nature Communications deals with their flexi-strechy skills and describes how man can now engineer an elastic film that lights up when stimulated using electricity. Meanwhile, a team of US material scientists has opted to create a new method of colour display using a technique they say will get us that much closer to the holy grail of cephalopod biomimicry studies: camouflaging "squid skin" that morphs into background shades automatically, (otherwise known as a metamaterial)."

It’s hip to be square if you’re a seahorse—or rather, it has certain adaptive advantages. Cylindrical tails may be much more popular in the animal kingdom, but the seahorse’s bizarre square-prism tail has far better mechanical properties.

The shifting colors on the skin of cuttlefish and other cephalopods could lead to bio-inspired camouflage and signalling, researchers say.

The European Union CoCoRo research consortium has been developing three varieties of autonomous underwater robots that school together like fish. By doing so, the little bots can share and learn from each others' "knowledge" of their environment, acting as a collective cognitive system.

"Scientists often look to biology for inspiration and innovation, emulating the way that nature builds to advance human engineering. Creatures of the ocean's depths are some of the most mysterious and fascinating subjects for study, due to the challenges of collecting them from very deep waters and for their unique adaptations for colonizing the sea floor. One such group is the hexactinellids, a collection of predominantly deep-sea sponges that produce elaborate skeletal systems of glass. Known as glass sponges, over the years their skeletal systems and their constituent elements (called spicules) have served as useful model systems for the design and fabrication of robust and damage tolerance."

"Engineers in the UK have found that limpets' teeth consist of the strongest biological material ever tested. Limpets use a tongue bristling with tiny teeth to scrape food off rocks and into their mouths, often swallowing particles of rock in the process. The teeth are made of a mineral-protein composite, which the researchers tested in tiny fragments in the laboratory.They found it was stronger than spider silk, as well as all but the very strongest of man-made materials.

The findings, published in the Royal Society's journal Interface, suggest that the secret to the material's strength is the thinness of its tightly packed mineral fibres - a discovery that could help improve the man-made composites used to build aircraft, cars and boats, as well as dental fillings."

"When you inflate a balloon and then release it without tying the valve shut, it certainly shoots away quickly. Octopi utilize the same basic principle, although they suck in and then rapidly expel water. An international team of scientists have now replicated that system in a soft-bodied miniature underwater vehicle, which could pave the way for very quickly-accelerating full-size submersibles."

Studying the movements of creatures in the natural world is very useful to robotics as the latest version of a robotic octopus from Greece shows. But real octopodes could also learn from their robotic cousin, which uses its octopus-inspired anatomy to propel itself in new ways.