Peter Forbes

_ I’ve been re-reading James Gordon’s two Penguin books The New Science of Strong Materials and Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down. I can say that I’ve learnt more about the physical world from these two books than from any other source. Gordon was a British engineer and materials scientist who can claim to be the pioneer of biomimetics in Britain.

Gordon shows, with the confidence of an engineer who’d made materials for WW2 fighter planes but with a disarming irreverence, why it’s almost impossible to destroy a brick arch, why the comet airliner crashed, why ships still break in two, how to create superstore whiskers of glass, and countless others insights into our material world.

As the first biomimetician he counters the prejudice many engineers used to have against natural materials, showing how many natural materials exceed conventional engineering materials in their properties. Above all he explains the difference between strength, stiffness, toughness and elsaticity in the most vivid way possible. 

The great beauty of structural engineering is that that the whole subject can be explained in terms of two opposed concepts: compression and tension. The interrelationship between the two lies behind every structure, from the Parthenon to the London Eye. Once you grasp this, buildings and bridges never look the same again. As a rule of thumb, all buildings until the 19th century used compression only, but architects and engineers now increasingly favour tension structures, being lighter and potentially more elegant, hence those wonderful cable-stayed bridges.

Not only do you learn wonderful things from Gordon’s books, he writes so well, with a tone so intimate you feel he is talking just to you. He laces his text with stories from nature, the classical world (a passion of his), and his own rich experience of the triumphs and disasters of a life in engineering. They are books to re-read as you might want to read again any literary classic. They are literary classics.

 

_ In The Gecko’s Foot I went out on a limb for tensegrity. It was mostly a macro-scale architectural technique that derived from the innovative sculptures of Kenneth Snelson. But it does have a biomimetic angle: Donald Ingber, at Harvard, has shown how the cell uses tensegrity to maintain its shape.

Tensegrity structures are held together by tension elements. There are stiff rods but in a classic tensegrity these do not touch. They are quite simple to make and great fun. I couldn’t resist them for The Gecko’s Foot.

Tensegrity is now a very live area of nantechonological research thanks to more work at Harvard, developing tensegrity DNA structures. An editorial in Nature Nanotechnology (2010, 5, p. 473) stressed the links that can be made between macro and nano – tensegrity began with large sculptures but is now proving fruitful at the nanoscale. In this it is following the path that led from Buckminster Fuller’s architectural domes to the tiny C60 molecule named buckminsterfullerene in Fuller’s honour.

_ Everyone who writes a book hopes that long after the fuss and fret of producing it has gone the book will still working for them, out there, winning new readings and earning a bob or two without any further effort on the author’s part. That is the warm fantasy. In fact, most books have a short shelf life and go out of print.

So it’s a bonus when, having been more or less forgotten by the author, a book comes back into print, relaunched, with a new title and cover and new hope. OK, you know what’s coming next. Ten years ago I was a poetry animal 24/7: I edited Poetry Review, wrote reviews, compiled anthologies. Then I made the change and am now a full-on popular science creature. But, in a pleasant blast from the past – more zephyr with a hint of spring – one of the anthologies is about to re-enter the world of print (also on ebook).

The Picador Book of Wedding Poems is published on January 5. It was first published in 2004 and I had forgotten what many of my choices had been. It came up fresh for so I hope it might work for others too.

_ Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, has attributed the fuss around Frozen Planet's use of zoo footage of polar bear cubs in what was supposed to be a wild setting to the Leveson enquiry into press standards. It seems far more likely to me to have been instigated by the global-warming denial lobby. David Attenborough is the most universally respected man in Britain and he has just made a powerful programme highlighting the consequences of global warming. He did not actually discuss the mechanism of global warming through human-generated carbon dioxide emissions but the programme was still seen as a threat by this lobby. Their methods are always the same: not to address the scientific evidence but to distract by dirty tricks, attacking by scurrilous means the people promulgating the arguments in favour of reducing fossil-fuel burning. There is no real problem with the polar bear footage. To put a camera into a bear’s den in its natural habitat would have endangered the cubs, when the whole point of the programme was to show how climate change threatens the survival of such creatures.

The really shocking story this week is Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. At the moment the world seems hell-bent on conducting this experiment in global warming. And we are supposed to get irate because of a few seconds on footage in a zoo, rather than under the snowy wastes.

_ There is something Ptolemaic about the European Union. If that sounds like a candidate for Pseuds' Corner, let me explain. Before Copernicus hit on the idea of the sun as the centre of the solar system, the attempt to account for the motions of the planets, assuming they revolved around the sun, involved a complex and ever growing system of epicycles, wheels within wheels, like a gigantic multispeed gearbox, with circles in greater circles, which in turn…

The European Union, in the original aim of bringing harmonization and the benefits of scale to the fragmented polities and economies of Europe, now stands as a 3-speed lashup, with 17 in the core Eurozone, 26 in the original outer planetary system, and a lone, what shall be call it –  shooting star would be the Tory Eurosceptic choice –  but mangy lost planet would be more appropriate. That’s the UK. The European Union is somewhat short of being a perfect Newtonian ellipse.

So perhaps the Euro project was an attempt – if not to square the circle – but to pretend that disparate economies, flying off in different directions, could somehow maintain a finely-tuned orbit? There are many contradictions in the idea of the single currency but the most obvious is that the German manufacturing powerhouse sells its goods on the world market at an exchange rate dragged down by being the same as that of Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Germany should be revaluing but can’t. The proposed new Treaty will set in legal stone the Stability and Growth Pact, which is an epicycle if ever I saw one. This pact, by restricting the annual budget deficit to 3% and public debt to 60% of GDP is profoundly deflationary. To call a deflationary measure a “growth” pact is a cruel joke.

Enough. The epicyclical moments could be multiplied. What is the way out of this towards a true system of European planetary harmony. Well, as the great cosmologist said “I wouldn’t start from here”

_ I’ve read a lot of very good journalism about the financial crisis, from people such as Robert Peston, Larry Elliott and Will Hutton but until now I’ve resisted the many books on the subject. This was a mistake, as I discovered when John Lanchester’s Whoops! – why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay landed on my desk.

Reading articles you get an impression of mayhem, panic and despair. What’s needed is the big picture that links all these scary phenomena. I can’t say that Lanchester’s is the best book on the crisis because it’s still the only one I’ve read but it’s hard to believe it could be bettered. Lanchester is very smart and not afraid of the arrogant obscurantism of the financial community: he shows them up as idiots when they are, as for example when they claim that the Crash was a once in the lifetime of the universe unforeseen event when in fact the conditions that triggered it – a 20% fall in house prices – had already occurred twice in Lanchester’s lifetime.

I can’t recommend this book too strongly. But do things look any brighter when the big picture becomes clearer? I can’t say they do. The financial sector seems to have hi-hacked the economy and the political process entirely for its own ends. There is an almost total disconnect between its self-fulfilling money-making wheezes and the actual economy in which people’s needs are met. If their mad deals make a profit, they win; if they fail and lose trillions, we have to bail them out. It is worse than I thought.

In 1936 the Swiss surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim created an art object, Le Déjeuner en fourrure, consisting of a teacup, saucer and spoon covered with fur from a Chinese gazelle. It is a classic of ambiguity, reminding us that we have a tendency to keep living things and non-living separate. We do not like wild animals in the house – spiders, mice, cockroaches – because indoors is our realm, orderly and hygienic: it is the antithesis of anarchic disease-ridden nature.

But some of the most original work in science is now being done by biomimeticians who happily combine natural structures with technical ones. Angela Belcher at MIT works with bacteriophages. Genetic engineering techniques have enabled scientists to test millions of random peptide sequences (peptides are short sequences of amino acids; effectively mini-proteins), in a process known as bio-panning, to see if any have the ability to interact with inorganic computer components. The test peptide sequences are created on the surface of the phage heads.

Belcher has now developed a whole array of electronic components, always using the phage as the template. Sometimes the phage itself is sacrificed, burnt off, leaving the metal and mineral components in place, sometimes there is no need to do this. In a charming graphic twist on the vegetable/mineral interface, Belcher has a schematic depicting the process in which the phage is stylized as a rocket (very like a World War  V2). This is the fur-lined teacup in reverse: a living, organic creature tricked out as a technical device.

_ In writing The Gecko’s Foot, one technique of biomimetics was so obvious that I missed it altogether. Nature’s nano-structures – whether it be the fine structure of butterfly wing scales or the bumpy surface of self-cleaning lotus leaf or the millions of tiny spatula hairs on a gecko’s foot or the calcite lens of a brittle star – have optical or superhydrophobic or powerful adhesive properties that we would dearly love to replicate. It didn’t occur to me that instead of trying to find synthetic methods of duplicating them, it might be possible to simply use the natural structure as a template, creating a negative of the structure  which can then be used to mould the replica. This is now a growing technique. It is often said that we shouldn’t copy nature slavishly – we should be smarter than that – but sometimes it might just be the best bet. Incidentally, the journal in which the following review appears is a valuable source of updates.

Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, 2011, 6 No 3, September, 031001.

_ Perhaps the most far-out concept in The Gecko’s Foot is the Micro Air Vehicle (MAV). This is a robot fly or bee intended to fly into restricted spaces and relay video back to control. The MAV would use flapping flight and have to be self-orientating. I was worried about this one. The idea was intrinsically appealing and, given the progress of chip miniaturization and micro-fabrication, I didn’t doubt that it was possible. But for a few years nothing much seemed to happen. But now papers are coming thick and fast and the first such robot fly, from Robert J Wood’s lab flew this year. Another team has tried to trump this by attaching a chip to a beetle which enables human control of the beetle’s movements. Which will triumph – the hi-jacked insect or the fully synthetic robot? Wait and see.  Meanwhile, you can see how Wood’s team fabricate the Harvard Monolithic Bee:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxSs1kGZQqc&feature=player_embedded

_ When I wrote The Gecko’s Foot, published in 2005, I took a punt on a handful of new technologies derived from nature that seemed to me the most promising. I confess that I didn’t fully realise just how long the lead time could be in bringing such techniques to fruition. But six years on, most of them are burgeoning and beginning to fulfil their promise. It seems a good time to check them, one by one.

Far and way the lead technology is the Lotus Effect: self-cleaning surfaces that are either superhydrophobic or superhydrophilic, inspired by the age-old symbol of purity, the sacred lots plant.  Many labs across the world have contributed to this and there are now many products on the market with self-cleaning properties. St Pancras station in London now has a roof of self-cleaning glass. The latest twist is to the create surface that are omniphobic – meaning equally repellent to oil and water. This is quite hard to do, oil and water having notoriously different wetting properties. But this now seems possible by mimicking the pitcher plant, which lives by luring insects into its pitcher: the walls are intensely slippery and once in, nothing gets out.  You can read all about it in Nature, 2011, 477, p. 443.