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It is a thrill to be here at a conference

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that's devoted to "Inspired by Nature" -- you can imagine.

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And I'm also thrilled to be in the foreplay section.

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Did you notice this section is foreplay?

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Because I get to talk about one of my favorite critters,

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which is the Western Grebe. You haven't lived

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until you've seen these guys do their courtship dance.

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I was on Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park,

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which is a long, skinny lake with sort of mountains upside down in it,

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and my partner and I have a rowing shell.

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And so we were rowing, and one of these Western Grebes came along.

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And what they do for their courtship dance is, they go together,

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the two of them, the two mates, and they begin to run underwater.

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They paddle faster, and faster, and faster, until they're going so fast

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that they literally lift up out of the water,

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and they're standing upright, sort of paddling the top of the water.

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And one of these Grebes came along while we were rowing.

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And so we're in a skull, and we're moving really, really quickly.

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And this Grebe, I think, sort of, mistaked us for a prospect,

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and started to run along the water next to us,

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in a courtship dance -- for miles.

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It would stop, and then start, and then stop, and then start.

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Now that is foreplay.

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(Laughter)

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I came this close to changing species at that moment.

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Obviously, life can teach us something

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in the entertainment section. Life has a lot to teach us.

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But what I'd like to talk about today

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is what life might teach us in technology and in design.

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What's happened since the book came out --

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the book was mainly about research in biomimicry --

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and what's happened since then is architects, designers, engineers --

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people who make our world -- have started to call and say,

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we want a biologist to sit at the design table

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to help us, in real time, become inspired.

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Or -- and this is the fun part for me -- we want you to take us out

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into the natural world. We'll come with a design challenge

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and we find the champion adapters in the natural world, who might inspire us.

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So this is a picture from a Galapagos trip that we took

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with some wastewater treatment engineers; they purify wastewater.

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And some of them were very resistant, actually, to being there.

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What they said to us at first was, you know, we already do biomimicry.

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We use bacteria to clean our water. And we said,

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well, that's not exactly being inspired by nature.

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That's bioprocessing, you know; that's bio-assisted technology:

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using an organism to do your wastewater treatment

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is an old, old technology called "domestication."

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This is learning something, learning an idea, from an organism and then applying it.

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And so they still weren't getting it.

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So we went for a walk on the beach and I said,

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well, give me one of your big problems. Give me a design challenge,

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sustainability speed bump, that's keeping you from being sustainable.

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And they said scaling, which is the build-up of minerals inside of pipes.

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And they said, you know what happens is, mineral --

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just like at your house -- mineral builds up.

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And then the aperture closes, and we have to flush the pipes with toxins,

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or we have to dig them up.

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So if we had some way to stop this scaling --

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and so I picked up some shells on the beach. And I asked them,

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what is scaling? What's inside your pipes?

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And they said, calcium carbonate.

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And I said, that's what this is; this is calcium carbonate.

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And they didn't know that.

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They didn't know that what a seashell is,

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it's templated by proteins, and then ions from the seawater

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crystallize in place to create a shell.

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So the same sort of a process, without the proteins,

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is happening on the inside of their pipes. They didn't know.

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This is not for lack of information; it's a lack of integration.

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You know, it's a silo, people in silos. They didn't know

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that the same thing was happening. So one of them thought about it

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and said, OK, well, if this is just crystallization

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that happens automatically out of seawater -- self-assembly --

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then why aren't shells infinite in size? What stops the scaling?

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Why don't they just keep on going?

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And I said, well, in the same way

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that they exude a protein and it starts the crystallization --

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and then they all sort of leaned in --

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they let go of a protein that stops the crystallization.

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It literally adheres to the growing face of the crystal.

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And, in fact, there is a product called TPA

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that's mimicked that protein -- that stop-protein --

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and it's an environmentally friendly way to stop scaling in pipes.

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That changed everything. From then on,

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you could not get these engineers back in the boat.

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The first day they would take a hike,

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and it was, click, click, click, click. Five minutes later they were back in the boat.

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We're done. You know, I've seen that island.

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After this,

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they were crawling all over. They would snorkel

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for as long as we would let them snorkel.

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What had happened was that they realized that there were organisms

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out there that had already solved the problems

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that they had spent their careers trying to solve.

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Learning about the natural world is one thing;

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learning from the natural world -- that's the switch.

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That's the profound switch.

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What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere;

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they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world.

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3.8 billion years of field-testing.

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10 to 30 -- Craig Venter will probably tell you;

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I think there's a lot more than 30 million -- well-adapted solutions.

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The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context.

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And the context is the Earth --

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the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in.

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So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius.

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It's not slavishly mimicking --

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although Al is trying to get the hairdo going --

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it's not a slavish mimicry; it's taking the design principles,

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the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it.

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Now, in a group with so many IT people, I do have to mention what

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I'm not going to talk about, and that is that your field

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is one that has learned an enormous amount from living things,

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on the software side. So there's computers that protect themselves,

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like an immune system, and we're learning from gene regulation

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and biological development. And we're learning from neural nets,

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genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing.

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That's on the software side. But what's interesting to me

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is that we haven't looked at this, as much. I mean, these machines

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are really not very high tech in my estimation

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in the sense that there's dozens and dozens of carcinogens

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in the water in Silicon Valley.

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So the hardware

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is not at all up to snuff in terms of what life would call a success.

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So what can we learn about making -- not just computers, but everything?

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The plane you came in, cars, the seats that you're sitting on.

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How do we redesign the world that we make, the human-made world?

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More importantly, what should we ask in the next 10 years?

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And there's a lot of cool technologies out there that life has.

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What's the syllabus?

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Three questions, for me, are key.

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How does life make things?

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This is the opposite; this is how we make things.

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It's called heat, beat and treat --

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that's what material scientists call it.

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And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over

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and only 4 percent product. You heat it up; you beat it with high pressures;

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you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat.

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Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things?

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How does life make the most of things?

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That's a geranium pollen.

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And its shape is what gives it the function of being able

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to tumble through air so easily. Look at that shape.

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Life adds information to matter.

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In other words: structure.

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It gives it information. By adding information to matter,

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it gives it a function that's different than without that structure.

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And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems?

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Because life doesn't really deal in things;

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there are no things in the natural world divorced

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from their systems.

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Really quick syllabus.

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As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story,

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there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences.

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And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses

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and finding what their sort of grand challenges are.

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The two groups are not talking to each other.

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At all.

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What in the world of biology might be helpful at this juncture,

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to get us through this sort of evolutionary knothole that we're in?

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I'm going to try to go through 12, really quickly.

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One that's exciting to me is self-assembly.

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Now, you've heard about this in terms of nanotechnology.

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Back to that shell: the shell is a self-assembling material.

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On the lower left there is a picture of mother of pearl

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forming out of seawater. It's a layered structure that's mineral

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and then polymer, and it makes it very, very tough.

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It's twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics.

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But what's really interesting: unlike our ceramics that are in kilns,

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it happens in seawater. It happens near, in and near, the organism's body.

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This is Sandia National Labs.

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A guy named Jeff Brinker

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has found a way to have a self-assembling coding process.

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Imagine being able to make ceramics at room temperature

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by simply dipping something into a liquid,

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lifting it out of the liquid, and having evaporation

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force the molecules in the liquid together,

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so that they jigsaw together

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in the same way as this crystallization works.

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Imagine making all of our hard materials that way.

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Imagine spraying the precursors to a PV cell, to a solar cell,

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onto a roof, and having it self-assemble into a layered structure that harvests light.

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Here's an interesting one for the IT world:

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bio-silicon. This is a diatom, which is made of silicates.

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And so silicon, which we make right now --

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it's part of our carcinogenic problem in the manufacture of our chips --

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this is a bio-mineralization process that's now being mimicked.

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This is at UC Santa Barbara. Look at these diatoms.

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This is from Ernst Haeckel's work.

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Imagine being able to -- and, again, it's a templated process,

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and it solidifies out of a liquid process -- imagine being able to have that

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sort of structure coming out at room temperature.

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Imagine being able to make perfect lenses.

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On the left, this is a brittle star; it's covered with lenses

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that the people at Lucent Technologies have found

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have no distortion whatsoever.

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It's one of the most distortion-free lenses we know of.

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And there's many of them, all over its entire body.

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What's interesting, again, is that it self-assembles.

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A woman named Joanna Aizenberg, at Lucent,

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is now learning to do this in a low-temperature process to create

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these sort of lenses. She's also looking at fiber optics.

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That's a sea sponge that has a fiber optic.

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Down at the very base of it, there's fiber optics

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that work better than ours, actually, to move light,

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but you can tie them in a knot; they're incredibly flexible.

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Here's another big idea: CO2 as a feedstock.

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A guy named Geoff Coates, at Cornell, said to himself,

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you know, plants do not see CO2 as the biggest poison of our time.

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We see it that way. Plants are busy making long chains

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of starches and glucose, right, out of CO2. He's found a way --

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he's found a catalyst -- and he's found a way to take CO2

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and make it into polycarbonates. Biodegradable plastics

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out of CO2 -- how plant-like.

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Solar transformations: the most exciting one.

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There are people who are mimicking the energy-harvesting device

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inside of purple bacterium, the people at ASU. Even more interesting,

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lately, in the last couple of weeks, people have seen

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that there's an enzyme called hydrogenase that's able to evolve

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hydrogen from proton and electrons, and is able to take hydrogen up --

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basically what's happening in a fuel cell, in the anode of a fuel cell

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and in a reversible fuel cell.

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In our fuel cells, we do it with platinum;

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life does it with a very, very common iron.

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And a team has now just been able to mimic

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that hydrogen-juggling hydrogenase.

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That's very exciting for fuel cells --

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to be able to do that without platinum.

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Power of shape: here's a whale. We've seen that the fins of this whale

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have tubercles on them. And those little bumps

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actually increase efficiency in, for instance,

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the edge of an airplane -- increase efficiency by about 32 percent.

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Which is an amazing fossil fuel savings,

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if we were to just put that on the edge of a wing.

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Color without pigments: this peacock is creating color with shape.

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Light comes through, it bounces back off the layers;

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it's called thin-film interference. Imagine being able

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to self-assemble products with the last few layers

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playing with light to create color.

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Imagine being able to create a shape on the outside of a surface,

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so that it's self-cleaning with just water. That's what a leaf does.

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See that up-close picture?

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That's a ball of water, and those are dirt particles.

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And that's an up-close picture of a lotus leaf.

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There's a company making a product called Lotusan, which mimics --

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when the building facade paint dries, it mimics the bumps

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in a self-cleaning leaf, and rainwater cleans the building.

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Water is going to be our big, grand challenge:

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quenching thirst.

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Here are two organisms that pull water.

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The one on the left is the Namibian beetle pulling water out of fog.

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The one on the right is a pill bug -- pulls water out of air,

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does not drink fresh water.

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Pulling water out of Monterey fog and out of the sweaty air in Atlanta,

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before it gets into a building, are key technologies.

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Separation technologies are going to be extremely important.

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What if we were to say, no more hard rock mining?

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What if we were to separate out metals from waste streams,

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small amounts of metals in water? That's what microbes do;

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they chelate metals out of water.

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There's a company here in San Francisco called MR3

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that is embedding mimics of the microbes' molecules on filters

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to mine waste streams.

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Green chemistry is chemistry in water.

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We do chemistry in organic solvents.

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This is a picture of the spinnerets coming out of a spider

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and the silk being formed from a spider. Isn't that beautiful?

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Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book.

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It's not easy, because life uses

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only a subset of the elements in the periodic table.

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And we use all of them, even the toxic ones.

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To figure out the elegant recipes that would take the small subset

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of the periodic table, and create miracle materials like that cell,

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is the task of green chemistry.

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Timed degradation: packaging that is good

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until you don't want it to be good anymore, and dissolves on cue.

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That's a mussel you can find in the waters out here,

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and the threads holding it to a rock are timed; at exactly two years,

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they begin to dissolve.

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Healing: this is a good one.

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That little guy over there is a tardigrade.

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There is a problem with vaccines around the world

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not getting to patients. And the reason is

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that the refrigeration somehow gets broken;

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what's called the "cold chain" gets broken.

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A guy named Bruce Rosner looked at the tardigrade --

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which dries out completely, and yet stays alive for months

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and months and months, and is able to regenerate itself.

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And he found a way to dry out vaccines --

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encase them in the same sort of sugar capsules

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as the tardigrade has within its cells --

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meaning that vaccines no longer need to be refrigerated.

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They can be put in a glove compartment, OK.

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Learning from organisms. This is a session about water --

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learning about organisms that can do without water,

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in order to create a vaccine that lasts and lasts and lasts without refrigeration.

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I'm not going to get to 12.

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But what I am going to do is tell you that the most important thing,

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besides all of these adaptations, is the fact that these organisms

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have figured out a way to do the amazing things they do

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while taking care of the place

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that's going to take care of their offspring.

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When they're involved in foreplay,

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they're thinking about something very, very important --

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and that's having their genetic material

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remain, 10,000 generations from now.

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And that means finding a way to do what they do

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without destroying the place that'll take care of their offspring.

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That's the biggest design challenge.

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Luckily, there are millions and millions of geniuses

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willing to gift us with their best ideas.

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Good luck having a conversation with them.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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Chris Anderson: Talk about foreplay, I -- we need to get to 12, but really quickly.

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Janine Benyus: Oh really?

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CA: Yeah. Just like, you know, like the 10-second version

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of 10, 11 and 12. Because we just -- your slides are so gorgeous,

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and the ideas are so big, I can't stand to let you go down

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without seeing 10, 11 and 12.

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JB: OK, put this -- OK, I'll just hold this thing. OK, great.

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OK, so that's the healing one.

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Sensing and responding: feedback is a huge thing.

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This is a locust. There can be 80 million of them in a square kilometer,

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and yet they don't collide with one another.

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And yet we have 3.6 million car collisions a year.

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(Laughter)

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Right. There's a person at Newcastle

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who has figured out that it's a very large neuron.

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And she's actually figuring out how to make

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a collision-avoidance circuitry

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based on this very large neuron in the locust.

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This is a huge and important one, number 11.

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And that's the growing fertility.

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That means, you know, net fertility farming.

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We should be growing fertility. And, oh yes -- we get food, too.

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Because we have to grow the capacity of this planet

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to create more and more opportunities for life.

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And really, that's what other organisms do as well.

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In ensemble, that's what whole ecosystems do:

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they create more and more opportunities for life.

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Our farming has done the opposite.

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So, farming based on how a prairie builds soil,

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ranching based on how a native ungulate herd

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actually increases the health of the range,

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even wastewater treatment based on how a marsh

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not only cleans the water,

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but creates incredibly sparkling productivity.

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This is the simple design brief. I mean, it looks simple

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because the system, over 3.8 billion years, has worked this out.

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That is, those organisms that have not been able to figure out

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how to enhance or sweeten their places,

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are not around to tell us about it.

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That's the twelfth one.

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Life -- and this is the secret trick; this is the magic trick --

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life creates conditions conducive to life.

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It builds soil; it cleans air; it cleans water;

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it mixes the cocktail of gases that you and I need to live.

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And it does that in the middle of having great foreplay

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and meeting their needs. So it's not mutually exclusive.

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We have to find a way to meet our needs,

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while making of this place an Eden.

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CA: Janine, thank you so much.

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(Applause)