Ang Peregrino Recommends 78: AskNa​ture​.Org

Ask Nature
URL: http://​askna​ture​.org/

Imag­ine 3.8 bil­lion years of design bril­liance avail­able for free, at the moment of cre­ation, to any sus­tain­abil­ity inno­va­tor in the world.

Imag­ine nature’s most ele­gant ideas orga­nized by design and engi­neer­ing func­tion, so you can enter “fil­ter salt from water” and see how man­groves, pen­guins, and shore­birds desali­nate with­out fos­sil fuels.

Now imag­ine you can meet the peo­ple who have stud­ied these organ­isms, and together you can cre­ate the next great bio-inspired solution.

That’s the idea behind AskNa­ture, the online inspi­ra­tion source for the bio­mimicry com­mu­nity. Think of it as your home habitat—whether you’re a biol­o­gist who wants to share what you know about an amaz­ing organ­ism, or a designer, archi­tect, engi­neer, or chemist look­ing for planet-friendly solu­tions. AskNa­ture is where biol­ogy and design cross-pollinate, so bio-inspired break­throughs can be born.

AskNa­ture is a free, open source project, built by the com­mu­nity and for the com­mu­nity. Its goal is to con­nect inno­v­a­tive minds with life’s best ideas, and in the process, inspire tech­nolo­gies that cre­ate con­di­tions con­ducive to life. To accom­plish this, we’re doing some­thing that has never been done—organizing the world’s bio­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture by function.

What you’ll see on the site is a starter cul­ture of ideas—biological blue­prints and strate­gies, bio-inspired prod­ucts and design sketches, and bio­mim­ics you can talk to and col­lab­o­rate with.

Luck­ily, we live on a wildly diverse planet sur­rounded by genius, and now there’s one site where you can cel­e­brate, learn from, and even con­serve that genius. So please, come meet your men­tors, get involved, and be part of the design rev­o­lu­tion inspired by nature.

Because the earth has found a way to “live” for the last 3.5 bil­lion years, and with that accu­mu­lated expe­ri­ence, we can learn to pre­serve it for the next 3.5 bil­lion, Ang Pere­grino Rec­om­mends AskNa​ture​.Org this week.