Nature inspires research design

People today have been inundated with ridiculous notions of science fiction. Hollywood portrayals of advanced technology veer close to the impossible, with little basis in reality. Fortunately for science, researchers at Tech seem more inclined to look to Mother Nature for inspiration than to media fantasies.

In only its third semester of existence, the recently formed Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID) has already attracted a fair share of attention on campus.

The center is a gathering of the many scientific and engineering minds across wide-ranging disciplines that look to nature for inspiring solutions to engineering problems.

CBID was formed to identify and extract ideas from the rich source of solutions present within existing biological systems. These ideas would then be used to replicate the intelligence and efficiency of biology in artificial engineering solutions, a process known as biomimicry.

One example of nature's genius worth mimicking in engineering designs is the optimization of computation in thoughts. The average human brain uses many hundreds of billions of neurons to process mental tasks. Natural selection has allowed a worm species (Caenorhabditis elegans, a free-living soil nematode) to do the same with a neural capacity of only 302 neurons!

How is this remarkable optimization possible? This is the question Hang Lu, a Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering professor, looks to answer using Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and microfluidic chips.

According to Lu, the simplicity of the worm's anatomy and genome affords researchers a great way to study and analyze its genetic makeup at the lowest levels of its workings.

"The biological problem we're interested in is neuroscience ... It's about designing new gadgets to ask the right questions," Lu said, adding that understanding the worm's "computational system" will enable better construction of biosensors and artificial intelligence in the future.

Devices that use microfluidics technology have made it possible to probe test organisms at the microscopic level instead of at the macroscopic level at which experiments can currently be conducted. Lu explained, "You don't want to use a shovel to add sugar to your coffee; it's too big and it's inaccurate. Using MEMS and microfluidics is like using a teaspoon instead of a shovel."

The potential applications for this kind of multidisciplinary research are not only immediately relevant to neuroscience, but also to engineering. Lu likened her research on the nematode to the computer engineering problem of using fewer transistors on an integrated circuit to perform broader logic functions.

Encouraging coordination between faculty across disciplines as wide-ranging as biomolecular engineering, materials science and architecture in organizing CBID is part of a greater initiative by the Institute's management to do more of the same across campus.