Snakeskin Inspires Safer Buildings
New research shows that it might be a good idea to look for inspiration in nature when designing load-bearing foundations for buildings.
Despite human inventiveness and ingenuity, we still lag far behind the elegant and efficient solutions forged by nature over millions of years of evolution.
This also applies for buildings, where animals and plants, have developed extremely effective digging methods, for example, that are far more energy-efficient than modern tunneling machines, and even self-repairing foundations that are unusually resistant to erosion and earthquakes (yep, we’re talking about roots here).