WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000 It is a thrill to be here at a conference 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:09.000 that's devoted to "Inspired by Nature" -- you can imagine. 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:13.000 And I'm also thrilled to be in the foreplay section. 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:15.000 Did you notice this section is foreplay? 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:18.000 Because I get to talk about one of my favorite critters, 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:21.000 which is the Western Grebe. You haven't lived 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:25.000 until you've seen these guys do their courtship dance. 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:28.000 I was on Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park, 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:32.000 which is a long, skinny lake with sort of mountains upside down in it, 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:34.000 and my partner and I have a rowing shell. 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:40.000 And so we were rowing, and one of these Western Grebes came along. 00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:45.000 And what they do for their courtship dance is, they go together, 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:50.000 the two of them, the two mates, and they begin to run underwater. 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:54.000 They paddle faster, and faster, and faster, until they're going so fast 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:57.000 that they literally lift up out of the water, 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:01.000 and they're standing upright, sort of paddling the top of the water. 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:06.000 And one of these Grebes came along while we were rowing. 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:10.000 And so we're in a skull, and we're moving really, really quickly. 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:17.000 And this Grebe, I think, sort of, mistaked us for a prospect, 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:21.000 and started to run along the water next to us, 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:26.000 in a courtship dance -- for miles. 00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:30.000 It would stop, and then start, and then stop, and then start. 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:32.000 Now that is foreplay. 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:35.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:44.000 I came this close to changing species at that moment. 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:48.000 Obviously, life can teach us something 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:52.000 in the entertainment section. Life has a lot to teach us. 00:01:52.000 --> 00:01:55.000 But what I'd like to talk about today 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:59.000 is what life might teach us in technology and in design. 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:01.000 What's happened since the book came out -- 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:04.000 the book was mainly about research in biomimicry -- 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:08.000 and what's happened since then is architects, designers, engineers -- 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:11.000 people who make our world -- have started to call and say, 00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:15.000 we want a biologist to sit at the design table 00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:18.000 to help us, in real time, become inspired. 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:22.000 Or -- and this is the fun part for me -- we want you to take us out 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:24.000 into the natural world. We'll come with a design challenge 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:29.000 and we find the champion adapters in the natural world, who might inspire us. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:33.000 So this is a picture from a Galapagos trip that we took 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:37.000 with some wastewater treatment engineers; they purify wastewater. 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:40.000 And some of them were very resistant, actually, to being there. 00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:45.000 What they said to us at first was, you know, we already do biomimicry. 00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:50.000 We use bacteria to clean our water. And we said, 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:54.000 well, that's not exactly being inspired by nature. 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:58.000 That's bioprocessing, you know; that's bio-assisted technology: 00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:03.000 using an organism to do your wastewater treatment 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:06.000 is an old, old technology called "domestication." 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:13.000 This is learning something, learning an idea, from an organism and then applying it. 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:16.000 And so they still weren't getting it. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:18.000 So we went for a walk on the beach and I said, 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:23.000 well, give me one of your big problems. Give me a design challenge, 00:03:23.000 --> 00:03:26.000 sustainability speed bump, that's keeping you from being sustainable. 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:32.000 And they said scaling, which is the build-up of minerals inside of pipes. 00:03:32.000 --> 00:03:34.000 And they said, you know what happens is, mineral -- 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:36.000 just like at your house -- mineral builds up. 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:40.000 And then the aperture closes, and we have to flush the pipes with toxins, 00:03:40.000 --> 00:03:42.000 or we have to dig them up. 00:03:42.000 --> 00:03:45.000 So if we had some way to stop this scaling -- 00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:50.000 and so I picked up some shells on the beach. And I asked them, 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:52.000 what is scaling? What's inside your pipes? 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:55.000 And they said, calcium carbonate. 00:03:55.000 --> 00:03:58.000 And I said, that's what this is; this is calcium carbonate. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:01.000 And they didn't know that. 00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:03.000 They didn't know that what a seashell is, 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:07.000 it's templated by proteins, and then ions from the seawater 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:10.000 crystallize in place to create a shell. 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:14.000 So the same sort of a process, without the proteins, 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:17.000 is happening on the inside of their pipes. They didn't know. 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:23.000 This is not for lack of information; it's a lack of integration. 00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:26.000 You know, it's a silo, people in silos. They didn't know 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:29.000 that the same thing was happening. So one of them thought about it 00:04:29.000 --> 00:04:33.000 and said, OK, well, if this is just crystallization 00:04:33.000 --> 00:04:38.000 that happens automatically out of seawater -- self-assembly -- 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:43.000 then why aren't shells infinite in size? What stops the scaling? 00:04:43.000 --> 00:04:45.000 Why don't they just keep on going? 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:49.000 And I said, well, in the same way 00:04:49.000 --> 00:04:53.000 that they exude a protein and it starts the crystallization -- 00:04:53.000 --> 00:04:57.000 and then they all sort of leaned in -- 00:04:57.000 --> 00:05:00.000 they let go of a protein that stops the crystallization. 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:02.000 It literally adheres to the growing face of the crystal. 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:06.000 And, in fact, there is a product called TPA 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:11.000 that's mimicked that protein -- that stop-protein -- 00:05:11.000 --> 00:05:15.000 and it's an environmentally friendly way to stop scaling in pipes. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:19.000 That changed everything. From then on, 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:23.000 you could not get these engineers back in the boat. 00:05:23.000 --> 00:05:26.000 The first day they would take a hike, 00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:29.000 and it was, click, click, click, click. Five minutes later they were back in the boat. 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:33.000 We're done. You know, I've seen that island. 00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:35.000 After this, 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:38.000 they were crawling all over. They would snorkel 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:43.000 for as long as we would let them snorkel. 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:47.000 What had happened was that they realized that there were organisms 00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:51.000 out there that had already solved the problems 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:54.000 that they had spent their careers trying to solve. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:59.000 Learning about the natural world is one thing; 00:05:59.000 --> 00:06:01.000 learning from the natural world -- that's the switch. 00:06:01.000 --> 00:06:04.000 That's the profound switch. 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:08.000 What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:12.000 they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:16.000 3.8 billion years of field-testing. 00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:19.000 10 to 30 -- Craig Venter will probably tell you; 00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:23.000 I think there's a lot more than 30 million -- well-adapted solutions. 00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:31.000 The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. 00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:33.000 And the context is the Earth -- 00:06:33.000 --> 00:06:38.000 the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:42.000 So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. 00:06:42.000 --> 00:06:44.000 It's not slavishly mimicking -- 00:06:44.000 --> 00:06:47.000 although Al is trying to get the hairdo going -- 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:51.000 it's not a slavish mimicry; it's taking the design principles, 00:06:51.000 --> 00:06:56.000 the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:56.000 --> 00:07:00.000 Now, in a group with so many IT people, I do have to mention what 00:07:00.000 --> 00:07:03.000 I'm not going to talk about, and that is that your field 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:07.000 is one that has learned an enormous amount from living things, 00:07:07.000 --> 00:07:11.000 on the software side. So there's computers that protect themselves, 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:14.000 like an immune system, and we're learning from gene regulation 00:07:14.000 --> 00:07:19.000 and biological development. And we're learning from neural nets, 00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:22.000 genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing. 00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:27.000 That's on the software side. But what's interesting to me 00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:32.000 is that we haven't looked at this, as much. I mean, these machines 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:35.000 are really not very high tech in my estimation 00:07:35.000 --> 00:07:40.000 in the sense that there's dozens and dozens of carcinogens 00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:43.000 in the water in Silicon Valley. 00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:46.000 So the hardware 00:07:46.000 --> 00:07:51.000 is not at all up to snuff in terms of what life would call a success. 00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:56.000 So what can we learn about making -- not just computers, but everything? 00:07:56.000 --> 00:08:00.000 The plane you came in, cars, the seats that you're sitting on. 00:08:00.000 --> 00:08:07.000 How do we redesign the world that we make, the human-made world? 00:08:07.000 --> 00:08:11.000 More importantly, what should we ask in the next 10 years? 00:08:11.000 --> 00:08:14.000 And there's a lot of cool technologies out there that life has. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:14.000 --> 00:08:16.000 What's the syllabus? 00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:20.000 Three questions, for me, are key. 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:22.000 How does life make things? 00:08:22.000 --> 00:08:25.000 This is the opposite; this is how we make things. 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:27.000 It's called heat, beat and treat -- 00:08:27.000 --> 00:08:29.000 that's what material scientists call it. 00:08:29.000 --> 00:08:34.000 And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over 00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:39.000 and only 4 percent product. You heat it up; you beat it with high pressures; 00:08:39.000 --> 00:08:42.000 you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:46.000 Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? 00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:49.000 How does life make the most of things? 00:08:49.000 --> 00:08:52.000 That's a geranium pollen. 00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:57.000 And its shape is what gives it the function of being able 00:08:57.000 --> 00:09:01.000 to tumble through air so easily. Look at that shape. 00:09:01.000 --> 00:09:06.000 Life adds information to matter. 00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:08.000 In other words: structure. 00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:13.000 It gives it information. By adding information to matter, 00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:19.000 it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. 00:09:19.000 --> 00:09:24.000 And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:29.000 Because life doesn't really deal in things; 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:33.000 there are no things in the natural world divorced 00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:36.000 from their systems. 00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:38.000 Really quick syllabus. 00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:44.000 As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, 00:09:44.000 --> 00:09:48.000 there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:51.000 And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses 00:09:51.000 --> 00:09:55.000 and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. 00:09:55.000 --> 00:09:57.000 The two groups are not talking to each other. 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:00.000 At all. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:04.000 What in the world of biology might be helpful at this juncture, 00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:09.000 to get us through this sort of evolutionary knothole that we're in? 00:10:09.000 --> 00:10:12.000 I'm going to try to go through 12, really quickly. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:15.000 One that's exciting to me is self-assembly. 00:10:15.000 --> 00:10:19.000 Now, you've heard about this in terms of nanotechnology. 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:23.000 Back to that shell: the shell is a self-assembling material. 00:10:23.000 --> 00:10:27.000 On the lower left there is a picture of mother of pearl 00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:31.000 forming out of seawater. It's a layered structure that's mineral 00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:34.000 and then polymer, and it makes it very, very tough. 00:10:34.000 --> 00:10:37.000 It's twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics. 00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:41.000 But what's really interesting: unlike our ceramics that are in kilns, 00:10:41.000 --> 00:10:46.000 it happens in seawater. It happens near, in and near, the organism's body. 00:10:46.000 --> 00:10:48.000 This is Sandia National Labs. 00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:53.000 A guy named Jeff Brinker 00:10:53.000 --> 00:10:57.000 has found a way to have a self-assembling coding process. 00:10:57.000 --> 00:11:01.000 Imagine being able to make ceramics at room temperature 00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:05.000 by simply dipping something into a liquid, 00:11:05.000 --> 00:11:08.000 lifting it out of the liquid, and having evaporation 00:11:08.000 --> 00:11:12.000 force the molecules in the liquid together, 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:14.000 so that they jigsaw together 00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:18.000 in the same way as this crystallization works. 00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:21.000 Imagine making all of our hard materials that way. 00:11:21.000 --> 00:11:28.000 Imagine spraying the precursors to a PV cell, to a solar cell, 00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:32.000 onto a roof, and having it self-assemble into a layered structure that harvests light. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:36.000 Here's an interesting one for the IT world: 00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:41.000 bio-silicon. This is a diatom, which is made of silicates. 00:11:41.000 --> 00:11:43.000 And so silicon, which we make right now -- 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:49.000 it's part of our carcinogenic problem in the manufacture of our chips -- 00:11:49.000 --> 00:11:53.000 this is a bio-mineralization process that's now being mimicked. 00:11:53.000 --> 00:11:57.000 This is at UC Santa Barbara. Look at these diatoms. 00:11:57.000 --> 00:12:00.000 This is from Ernst Haeckel's work. 00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:05.000 Imagine being able to -- and, again, it's a templated process, 00:12:05.000 --> 00:12:09.000 and it solidifies out of a liquid process -- imagine being able to have that 00:12:09.000 --> 00:12:13.000 sort of structure coming out at room temperature. 00:12:13.000 --> 00:12:16.000 Imagine being able to make perfect lenses. 00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:21.000 On the left, this is a brittle star; it's covered with lenses 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:24.000 that the people at Lucent Technologies have found 00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:26.000 have no distortion whatsoever. 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:29.000 It's one of the most distortion-free lenses we know of. 00:12:29.000 --> 00:12:32.000 And there's many of them, all over its entire body. 00:12:32.000 --> 00:12:35.000 What's interesting, again, is that it self-assembles. 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:39.000 A woman named Joanna Aizenberg, at Lucent, 00:12:39.000 --> 00:12:43.000 is now learning to do this in a low-temperature process to create 00:12:43.000 --> 00:12:47.000 these sort of lenses. She's also looking at fiber optics. 00:12:47.000 --> 00:12:50.000 That's a sea sponge that has a fiber optic. 00:12:50.000 --> 00:12:53.000 Down at the very base of it, there's fiber optics 00:12:53.000 --> 00:12:56.000 that work better than ours, actually, to move light, 00:12:56.000 --> 00:13:02.000 but you can tie them in a knot; they're incredibly flexible. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:06.000 Here's another big idea: CO2 as a feedstock. 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:09.000 A guy named Geoff Coates, at Cornell, said to himself, 00:13:09.000 --> 00:13:13.000 you know, plants do not see CO2 as the biggest poison of our time. 00:13:13.000 --> 00:13:16.000 We see it that way. Plants are busy making long chains 00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:22.000 of starches and glucose, right, out of CO2. He's found a way -- 00:13:22.000 --> 00:13:25.000 he's found a catalyst -- and he's found a way to take CO2 00:13:25.000 --> 00:13:29.000 and make it into polycarbonates. Biodegradable plastics 00:13:29.000 --> 00:13:31.000 out of CO2 -- how plant-like. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:31.000 --> 00:13:34.000 Solar transformations: the most exciting one. 00:13:34.000 --> 00:13:38.000 There are people who are mimicking the energy-harvesting device 00:13:38.000 --> 00:13:42.000 inside of purple bacterium, the people at ASU. Even more interesting, 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:45.000 lately, in the last couple of weeks, people have seen 00:13:45.000 --> 00:13:50.000 that there's an enzyme called hydrogenase that's able to evolve 00:13:50.000 --> 00:13:54.000 hydrogen from proton and electrons, and is able to take hydrogen up -- 00:13:54.000 --> 00:13:59.000 basically what's happening in a fuel cell, in the anode of a fuel cell 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:01.000 and in a reversible fuel cell. 00:14:01.000 --> 00:14:04.000 In our fuel cells, we do it with platinum; 00:14:04.000 --> 00:14:08.000 life does it with a very, very common iron. 00:14:08.000 --> 00:14:12.000 And a team has now just been able to mimic 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:17.000 that hydrogen-juggling hydrogenase. 00:14:17.000 --> 00:14:19.000 That's very exciting for fuel cells -- 00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:22.000 to be able to do that without platinum. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:27.000 Power of shape: here's a whale. We've seen that the fins of this whale 00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:30.000 have tubercles on them. And those little bumps 00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:35.000 actually increase efficiency in, for instance, 00:14:35.000 --> 00:14:40.000 the edge of an airplane -- increase efficiency by about 32 percent. 00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:42.000 Which is an amazing fossil fuel savings, 00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:47.000 if we were to just put that on the edge of a wing. 00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:51.000 Color without pigments: this peacock is creating color with shape. 00:14:51.000 --> 00:14:54.000 Light comes through, it bounces back off the layers; 00:14:54.000 --> 00:14:57.000 it's called thin-film interference. Imagine being able 00:14:57.000 --> 00:15:00.000 to self-assemble products with the last few layers 00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:04.000 playing with light to create color. 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:09.000 Imagine being able to create a shape on the outside of a surface, 00:15:09.000 --> 00:15:14.000 so that it's self-cleaning with just water. That's what a leaf does. 00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:16.000 See that up-close picture? 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:19.000 That's a ball of water, and those are dirt particles. 00:15:19.000 --> 00:15:22.000 And that's an up-close picture of a lotus leaf. 00:15:22.000 --> 00:15:27.000 There's a company making a product called Lotusan, which mimics -- 00:15:27.000 --> 00:15:31.000 when the building facade paint dries, it mimics the bumps 00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:36.000 in a self-cleaning leaf, and rainwater cleans the building. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:36.000 --> 00:15:42.000 Water is going to be our big, grand challenge: 00:15:42.000 --> 00:15:44.000 quenching thirst. 00:15:44.000 --> 00:15:47.000 Here are two organisms that pull water. 00:15:47.000 --> 00:15:51.000 The one on the left is the Namibian beetle pulling water out of fog. 00:15:51.000 --> 00:15:54.000 The one on the right is a pill bug -- pulls water out of air, 00:15:54.000 --> 00:15:57.000 does not drink fresh water. 00:15:57.000 --> 00:16:04.000 Pulling water out of Monterey fog and out of the sweaty air in Atlanta, 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:08.000 before it gets into a building, are key technologies. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:12.000 Separation technologies are going to be extremely important. 00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:16.000 What if we were to say, no more hard rock mining? 00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:22.000 What if we were to separate out metals from waste streams, 00:16:22.000 --> 00:16:26.000 small amounts of metals in water? That's what microbes do; 00:16:26.000 --> 00:16:28.000 they chelate metals out of water. 00:16:28.000 --> 00:16:31.000 There's a company here in San Francisco called MR3 00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:37.000 that is embedding mimics of the microbes' molecules on filters 00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:40.000 to mine waste streams. 00:16:40.000 --> 00:16:44.000 Green chemistry is chemistry in water. 00:16:44.000 --> 00:16:46.000 We do chemistry in organic solvents. 00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:50.000 This is a picture of the spinnerets coming out of a spider 00:16:50.000 --> 00:16:53.000 and the silk being formed from a spider. Isn't that beautiful? 00:16:53.000 --> 00:17:01.000 Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. 00:17:01.000 --> 00:17:06.000 It's not easy, because life uses 00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:10.000 only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. 00:17:10.000 --> 00:17:14.000 And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. 00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:19.000 To figure out the elegant recipes that would take the small subset 00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:25.000 of the periodic table, and create miracle materials like that cell, 00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:27.000 is the task of green chemistry. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:27.000 --> 00:17:31.000 Timed degradation: packaging that is good 00:17:31.000 --> 00:17:35.000 until you don't want it to be good anymore, and dissolves on cue. 00:17:35.000 --> 00:17:38.000 That's a mussel you can find in the waters out here, 00:17:38.000 --> 00:17:42.000 and the threads holding it to a rock are timed; at exactly two years, 00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:44.000 they begin to dissolve. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:47.000 Healing: this is a good one. 00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:50.000 That little guy over there is a tardigrade. 00:17:50.000 --> 00:17:56.000 There is a problem with vaccines around the world 00:17:56.000 --> 00:17:59.000 not getting to patients. And the reason is 00:17:59.000 --> 00:18:03.000 that the refrigeration somehow gets broken; 00:18:03.000 --> 00:18:05.000 what's called the "cold chain" gets broken. 00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:08.000 A guy named Bruce Rosner looked at the tardigrade -- 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:14.000 which dries out completely, and yet stays alive for months 00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:17.000 and months and months, and is able to regenerate itself. 00:18:17.000 --> 00:18:20.000 And he found a way to dry out vaccines -- 00:18:20.000 --> 00:18:24.000 encase them in the same sort of sugar capsules 00:18:24.000 --> 00:18:27.000 as the tardigrade has within its cells -- 00:18:27.000 --> 00:18:32.000 meaning that vaccines no longer need to be refrigerated. 00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:36.000 They can be put in a glove compartment, OK. 00:18:36.000 --> 00:18:41.000 Learning from organisms. This is a session about water -- 00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:44.000 learning about organisms that can do without water, 00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:51.000 in order to create a vaccine that lasts and lasts and lasts without refrigeration. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:51.000 --> 00:18:54.000 I'm not going to get to 12. 00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:58.000 But what I am going to do is tell you that the most important thing, 00:18:58.000 --> 00:19:03.000 besides all of these adaptations, is the fact that these organisms 00:19:03.000 --> 00:19:08.000 have figured out a way to do the amazing things they do 00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:11.000 while taking care of the place 00:19:11.000 --> 00:19:16.000 that's going to take care of their offspring. 00:19:16.000 --> 00:19:19.000 When they're involved in foreplay, 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:22.000 they're thinking about something very, very important -- 00:19:22.000 --> 00:19:26.000 and that's having their genetic material 00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:31.000 remain, 10,000 generations from now. 00:19:31.000 --> 00:19:33.000 And that means finding a way to do what they do 00:19:33.000 --> 00:19:37.000 without destroying the place that'll take care of their offspring. 00:19:37.000 --> 00:19:40.000 That's the biggest design challenge. 00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:46.000 Luckily, there are millions and millions of geniuses 00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:49.000 willing to gift us with their best ideas. 00:19:49.000 --> 00:19:52.000 Good luck having a conversation with them. NOTE Paragraph 00:19:52.000 --> 00:19:53.000 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:19:53.000 --> 00:20:07.000 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:20:07.000 --> 00:20:11.000 Chris Anderson: Talk about foreplay, I -- we need to get to 12, but really quickly. NOTE Paragraph 00:20:11.000 --> 00:20:12.000 Janine Benyus: Oh really? 00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:15.000 CA: Yeah. Just like, you know, like the 10-second version 00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:18.000 of 10, 11 and 12. Because we just -- your slides are so gorgeous, 00:20:18.000 --> 00:20:20.000 and the ideas are so big, I can't stand to let you go down 00:20:20.000 --> 00:20:22.000 without seeing 10, 11 and 12. NOTE Paragraph 00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:26.000 JB: OK, put this -- OK, I'll just hold this thing. OK, great. 00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:29.000 OK, so that's the healing one. 00:20:29.000 --> 00:20:32.000 Sensing and responding: feedback is a huge thing. 00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:36.000 This is a locust. There can be 80 million of them in a square kilometer, 00:20:36.000 --> 00:20:39.000 and yet they don't collide with one another. 00:20:39.000 --> 00:20:44.000 And yet we have 3.6 million car collisions a year. 00:20:44.000 --> 00:20:46.000 (Laughter) 00:20:46.000 --> 00:20:50.000 Right. There's a person at Newcastle 00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:53.000 who has figured out that it's a very large neuron. 00:20:53.000 --> 00:20:56.000 And she's actually figuring out how to make 00:20:56.000 --> 00:20:58.000 a collision-avoidance circuitry 00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:02.000 based on this very large neuron in the locust. NOTE Paragraph 00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:04.000 This is a huge and important one, number 11. 00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:06.000 And that's the growing fertility. 00:21:06.000 --> 00:21:10.000 That means, you know, net fertility farming. 00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:14.000 We should be growing fertility. And, oh yes -- we get food, too. 00:21:14.000 --> 00:21:19.000 Because we have to grow the capacity of this planet 00:21:19.000 --> 00:21:22.000 to create more and more opportunities for life. 00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:24.000 And really, that's what other organisms do as well. 00:21:24.000 --> 00:21:27.000 In ensemble, that's what whole ecosystems do: 00:21:27.000 --> 00:21:30.000 they create more and more opportunities for life. 00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:33.000 Our farming has done the opposite. 00:21:33.000 --> 00:21:37.000 So, farming based on how a prairie builds soil, 00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:41.000 ranching based on how a native ungulate herd 00:21:41.000 --> 00:21:43.000 actually increases the health of the range, 00:21:43.000 --> 00:21:48.000 even wastewater treatment based on how a marsh 00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:50.000 not only cleans the water, 00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:54.000 but creates incredibly sparkling productivity. NOTE Paragraph 00:21:54.000 --> 00:21:58.000 This is the simple design brief. I mean, it looks simple 00:21:58.000 --> 00:22:03.000 because the system, over 3.8 billion years, has worked this out. 00:22:03.000 --> 00:22:08.000 That is, those organisms that have not been able to figure out 00:22:08.000 --> 00:22:12.000 how to enhance or sweeten their places, 00:22:12.000 --> 00:22:15.000 are not around to tell us about it. 00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:18.000 That's the twelfth one. 00:22:18.000 --> 00:22:22.000 Life -- and this is the secret trick; this is the magic trick -- 00:22:22.000 --> 00:22:26.000 life creates conditions conducive to life. 00:22:26.000 --> 00:22:30.000 It builds soil; it cleans air; it cleans water; 00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:33.000 it mixes the cocktail of gases that you and I need to live. 00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:39.000 And it does that in the middle of having great foreplay 00:22:39.000 --> 00:22:45.000 and meeting their needs. So it's not mutually exclusive. 00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:48.000 We have to find a way to meet our needs, 00:22:48.000 --> 00:22:54.000 while making of this place an Eden. NOTE Paragraph 00:22:54.000 --> 00:22:55.000 CA: Janine, thank you so much. 00:22:55.000 --> 00:22:56.000 (Applause)