Archive for the ‘Natural World’ Category
TIME: Oil Spill By The Numbers
Truth About Orgasms: Infographic
In Deeper Water: Oil Spill Infographic
LINKS:
Information Is Beautiful
“UrbanBuds” Portable Garden
Adam Franchino’s Ant Farm Music Project
Emotion Lab: Moonwatch
Rising Currents: Architectural Solutions To Climate Change
Diego Stocco’s Music From The Natural World
Diego Stocco – Music From A Bonsai from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.
Diego Stocco – Music From A Tree from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.
LINKS
Diego Stocco
Vimeo: Diego Stocco
Design Boom
Cool Hunting
Behance
Synthtopia
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Diego Stocco’s Twitter
ARTICLE: Leaf Veins the Future of Water/Electricity Distribution Networks
FIRST 3 PARAGRAPHS:
A team of biophysicists at Rockefeller University recently published a paper in Physical Review Letters about a new way to design distribution networks based on the veins that carry water and nutrients in most tree leaves. This is a great example of biomimicry! Evolution by natural selection maybe be blind, but it has had billions of years of trial-and-error to figure out efficient and robust ways to do things. The interconnecting vein loops in leaves are a good example of that, and we can learn from them.
“Operations researchers have long believed that the best distribution networks for many scenarios look like trees, with a succession of branches stemming from a central stalk and then branches from those branches and so on, to the desired destinations. But this kind of network is vulnerable: If it is severed at any place, the network is cut in two and cargo will fail to reach any point “downstream” of the break.”
A good example of that can be seen on the two pictures in this post. The big dots are damage in the network. In the pic on top, you can see that the flow isn’t stopped, and can go everywhere in the network. In the second pic, the flow is stopped everywhere downstream of the damage point.
LINKS:
Treehugger
Science Daily
Rockefeller University
Physical Review Letters
Biomimicry Institute (Blog)
