The Groasis Waterboxx (www.groasis.com) has won Popular Science’s Best of What’s New Innovation of the Year Award (http://www.popsci.com/bown/2010/product/aquapro-holland-groasis-waterboxx) by harnessing some nifty nature-inspired (biologically-inspired) engineering.Quoting Groasis’ website, “The Groasis waterboxx is an 'intelligent water incubator' that produces and captures water from the air through condensation and rain. The condensation is caused by artificial stimulation and the water is captured because of the design of the device, without using energy.” For a very instructive and entertaining animation visit www.groasis.com.
The design of the Groasis Waterboxx is a recent successful innovation based on the emerging science of biomimicry (the word is a combination of “bios”, meaning life, and “mimesis”, meaning ‘to imitate”) that looks at nature’s creations for mankind’s inspiration for building sustainable ecologically supportive solutions.
The most famous innovation using Biomimicry principles is, of course, Velcro. As described in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velcro ) - This hook-and-loop fastener was invented in 1941 by a Swiss engineer, George de Mestral who lived in Commugny, Switzerland. The idea came to him one day after returning from a hunting trip with his dog in the Alps. He took a close look at the burrs (seeds) of burdock that kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur. He examined them under a microscope, and noted their hundreds of "hooks" that caught on anything with a loop, such as clothing, animal fur, or hair. He saw the possibility of binding two materials reversibly in a simple fashion, if he could figure out how to duplicate the hooks and loops. Other examples at http://brainz.org/15-coolest-cases-biomimicry/
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