| When I gaze out of an airplane window toward the vast horizon, I'm often struck by an overwhelming feeling of awe. How am I so high up? How am I flying? How is this even possible?
The reason we can think, cry and gape up there in a tin can is that for centuries humans have looked to the sky and taken inspiration from the world's natural fliers. The 15th-century Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci analyzed the mechanics of winged creatures to design his ornithopter, a contraption with wings operated by a series of pulleys. In the 19th century, the German engineer Otto Lilienthal designed gliders based on his observations of birds. These ultimately inspired the Wright brothers, who in the early 1900s invented the first powered airplane.
Though the wings of Airbuses and 747s don't flap, the principles of flight were deduced from careful examination of the physics of bats, birds and insects. This phenomenon — where people model designs or machines after nature — is known as biomimicry or biomimetics. Today, such nature-inspired solutions are everywhere. In the 1940s, a Swiss engineer came up with Velcro after returning from a walk in the woods with cockleburs stuck to his legs and his dog. Japanese engineers modeled their efficient bullet trains after kingfishers. And scientists have worked to improve LED lights by studying shimmering fireflies.
In the race to create problem-solving designs, nature has a massive head start: billions of years of evolution. Though sometimes nature's solutions aren't exactly optimal — grasshoppers, for example, are masterful jumpers and very poor landers — they can inspire engineering solutions that surpass the originals.
I recently saw an old Reddit post that posed an interesting question: "If birds didn't exist, would planes?" Did we have to see an animal streak across the sky to imagine that we could do such a thing? Who knows, but it's amazing that a walk in the woods can be enough to inspire the next great idea.
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Planes can fly very well, but bird flight is something special. "Evolution has created a far more complicated flying device than we have ever been able to engineer," said Samik Bhattacharya, who studies experimental fluid mechanics at the University of Central Florida. For instance, some birds can morph their wings to flip between gliding and acrobatic flying. Other researchers have observed that hawks don't take the fastest or most energy-efficient path, but rather the one that allows them to land with the most control. As scientists continue to examine how birds maneuver so effortlessly, they hope we'll be able to improve our own aircraft.
For at least half a century, scientists have examined some of the most powerful jumpers in the animal kingdom to inform mechanical designs. Recently, they overcame nature's own limitations: Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara engineered a robot that jumped to a record-breaking height of 32.9 meters, or more than 100 feet. In nature, the energy available to drive a jump is limited to what's generated from the flex of a single muscle. But this robot can ratchet: through cranking, it stretches a spring and builds up stored energy. When the spring releases, the robot jumps to proportional heights not achieved by biological jumpers. "I think this is one of the very few robots that actually does outperform biology, and the way that it outperforms biology is incredibly clever," Ryan St. Pierre, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of Buffalo, told me.
And then there are the swimmers. Jellyfish and other aquatic animals may hold the secrets to designing effective submarines and efficient wind turbine systems, and could even teach us about the human heart — topics explored in an episode of our podcast, The Joy of Why. Jellies' elegant way of creating vortex "wings" to move in water can teach us basic principles of fluid dynamics. "Jellyfish are solving partial differential equations every day as they swim through the water. And so we just have to figure out exactly what it is about their swimming that allows them to come to that particular solution to those differential equations," said John Dabiri, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the California Institute of Technology. "And then the hope is, we can apply that to our own design problems where we don't have the same constraints as jellyfish had in evolution." | 
