Biomimicry: What Nature Can Teach us about Engineering and Design
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If biologist Alyssa Stark could choose an animal superpower, she might borrow some abilities from geckos. They can run up and upside down. They can run sideways. They can stick to pretty much any surface. They have an adhesive system that works over and over again on a variety of surfaces in a variety of contexts. And it doesn't require glue, so they can...

Alyssa is trying to figure out how geckos do that.

She gave me a tour of her lab at Villanova University near Philadelphia. She has two temperature-controlled chambers with geckos living in terrariums. They like it warm and humid. In one of the chambers, she keeps tokay geckos. They're about the size of my hand and an earthy brown color. ♪

So who do we have here? So this is Toke 113, and he's in the process of shedding his skin. So you can see he has a little bit left over. Alyssa studies the gecko's speed and adhesiveness in different situations to measure how much they stick. She takes one out so we can look at it up close. There's these lines on the bottom of the toes. You see those kind of lines?

that ripple across. Yes. The toes are kind of fat for what you might think a lizard toe looks like. And that's because geckos, although they are lizards, they have evolved these flattened toe pads. And each of these lines is actually full of tiny, tiny microscopic hair-like structures.

And so that's how they adhere. The other organisms that I study use various types of glue, but geckos don't. They have a dry adhesive system, so by having so many hairs on their feet, they kind of are multiplying the contact area that they can make with a surface. And that just basic multiplication kind of principle allows them to stick very strongly.

Alyssa is trying to understand and replicate this complicated adhesive system to create new applications for humans. Probably not gecko gloves or suits that would allow us to climb up a wall, but there could be innovative uses in healthcare. There's a big push towards medical adhesives because the gecko foot and those adhesive pads are soft and they don't require that glue, so you're not...

actually gluing skin that could be delicate, say if you're working with infants or the elderly, you have this soft adhesive that's strong and easily peeled off. And so a tape that could do that and then do that over and over again. So you don't have to keep replacing medical tape. You could just peel it back, do what you need to do and peel it back over. Yeah. And I guess it could also deal with changes in human temperature, sweat, because I mean, if you've ever had

a monitor stuck to you, they fall off all the time. Yes, exactly. That's the big challenge right now is how do you deal with two things, water and oil? Usually we can deal with one of them with adhesives, but dealing with both is very challenging. ♪

Alyssa is part of a growing field called biomimicry. The idea is to look to nature with its seemingly endless examples of brilliant design and engineering, to learn how these systems work and to try to replicate them. It's hard and humbling.

We still don't have this magic gecko tape that can do everything that a gecko can. And I think it's really because we're still trying to figure out how the natural system works. On this episode, nature's most ingenious designs, how they work, and how we can learn to apply them to our own challenges. ♪

To get started, let's hear from the science writer who coined the term biomimicry in the late 1990s, Janine Benyus. She's been fascinated with the natural world for as long as she can remember. Early on, she explored how plants and animals adapt to their habitats while creating systems that benefit them and the surrounding environment. And it just occurred to me one day,

Is anyone trying to learn from and not just about the natural world? She wondered, could we take strategies from nature and use them to solve big problems, issues like a warming planet or rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Because it seems to me that the sustainable world has already been invented. And it's literally the adaptations have been in place for 3.8 billion years.

and they've been evolving and getting better and better every year. And why aren't we mimicking that? I assume there was a field, and I realized that there really wasn't a single field. There were efforts in different areas. People were mimicking prairies and agriculture, but they called it natural systems agriculture.

In material science, they were calling it biomimetics. And in health, they were calling it zoopharmacognosy. Oh, that's catchy. Yeah, it runs off your tongue, right? And it didn't have an umbrella term. And I was shocked by that.

Janine compiled lots of research, and she started to work on a book about this idea of learning from nature. She felt like this should be a field of study, but it needed a name. And how did you come up with the term? Well, you know, it's interesting. Biomimicry is a term, you know, applied to mimicry of butterflies, for instance, to mimic poisonous butterflies, right? I knew that term before.

But I needed a term that would describe mimicking nature in a design context. So I went to the Webster's dictionary literally on my desk and bio means life and mimesis means to imitate, but that seemed a mouthful.

I literally named the folder that I was gathering my research in, I named that biomimicry. And when I went to publish the book, I wanted to call it Echoing Nature. And my editor said, no, absolutely not. We're going to name a field here. So we're calling it biomimicry.

Janine published that book in 1997, and it's called Biomimicry, Innovation Inspired by Nature. Shortly after its release, she co-founded a consulting firm called Biomimicry 3.8.

You've come up over the years with some principles about nature and your observations about how nature functions. For example, nature runs on sunlight. Nature uses only the energy it needs. Nature fits form to function. What are some other principles that you have put into this line of sentences and why are they so important? Well, one of the ones that is really important right now

is that nature taps the power of limits. And it's an interesting concept because we don't really like limits or to be limited. And yet in the natural world, an organism lives in a habitat that has a certain set of parameters of, you know, how hot it gets or how cold it gets and how much prey there is and what other organisms there are to be in mutualistic relationship with and

what kind of food's available. And what life tends to do is evolve and adapt within those limits, like dancing within those limits, and gets better and better and better, almost like a creative frame those limits become. And so they're not really a negative. In fact, if you're a denizen of your habitat, it is because you've figured out how to

take full advantage of the opportunities and to respect the limits. And that's something I think, you know, as we evolve, as we mature as a species, we'll hopefully learn to respect those limits, respect the Earth's limits, and then begin to innovate in response to them without trying to break through them all the time.

In her work, she's found that there are three levels of biomimicry. One was just mimicking form, you know, the shape of something. And that can be very powerful, like the shape of a humpback whale's fin has these amazing bumps on it that help it reduce drag by 32%. So putting that on a wind turbine is very powerful. That's form.

And then there's mimicking process. That's where you go deeper. The deeper form would be mimicking process, which is actually mimicking the chemistries. Like understanding the processes that allow geckos to stick to any surface and to try to replicate them.

The third level of biomimicry is the ability to mimic an entire ecosystem. How are we going to do that? So what we say is, well, if we go right next door to the healthiest place we can find and we measure all those ecological gifts that are being produced,

And then we go back and say, acre for acre, you should be storing this much water and cleaning this much water. These ecosystems do it to mimic those ecosystems to perform like a system, which is the deepest level of biomimicry. Janine says there is a great example of this third level, the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in D.C. It's a series of connected buildings with terraces and grass-covered roofs. From above, it kind of looks like it's made from green Legos.

When it rains, water flows from one building to the next. And then there are waterfalls going to the next green roof and to the next green roof and to the next green roof. And it empties into a big lake that was going to be the parking lot. Now, we mimicked...

A series of beaver ponds in a watershed and how at the top of the watershed, the water might come in polluted, but by the end, it's absolutely clean. So this building is actually purifying water that comes into it from up above. And the parking lot's underneath the ground now. And that entire building is now performing purification.

like a healthy wetland. And the Coast Guard's, you know, their motto is to protect our waters, and that's what they're doing, right? So it's possible to do this if we ask of our designs more than we have in the past. Now, once you understand the concept, once you look into biomimicry, it makes all of this inherent sense, right?

And it also seems like it's something that humans must have done for millions of years until we somehow got away from it. So what kind of signs do we see of humans learning from nature and imitating nature over time? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think you also see indigenous cultures that have not moved away from looking to the natural world for guidance or inspiration. You know, when you grow up,

and lived for generations in a watershed, you learned how to sort of look for the survivors and those organisms that excelled in that place. And you envied them and admired them, and you wanted to be more like them. You know, so if you think about snowshoes, they have a very particular shape that allows you to float around.

on the snow and that shape, those original snowshoes were very much like the snowshoe hare and chisels were very much like beaver teeth. So I think, I don't think this is new. I think we got away from it when we got very entranced with our own technological wizardry and when we started to see the unintended consequences.

of our industrial revolution is when we began to look for a different way of how might we power ourselves differently, build differently, manufacture differently, grow food differently, do business in a more circular and interconnected way. When we started to ask those questions,

it becomes natural to look to a system that has already done that and is doing that. And that's the system we're embedded in. I sort of think of myself as the queen of the obvious by pointing this out. But strangely enough...

You know, we had sort of taken this juggernaut away from Earth's wisdom for a long, long time, and we're turning back around now. Janine says biomimicry products can bring innovation to industries that have used the same processes for a long time. For instance, we've been using paints and pigments and dyes for thousands of years. And the way we do them now, they're synthetic and they're really toxic.

and they can be. So there's an entirely different way of dealing with color or creating color, I should say. And in the natural world the most colorful things like butterflies and hummingbird necks, these are called structural color. Like a peacock is a completely brown bird but for its particular kind of layering and structure of its feathers that refracts light, reflects light in a certain way to your eyes. It creates a color.

through structure. So now there are companies, there's a company called Impossible Material that's making the color white. It studied an Asian beetle that is a very bright white and it's literally fibers in its shell that scatter light completely. And so it's using that concept to make white cellulose

Out of cellulose rather than out of pigments. And so the color white, which used to be you mined titanium dioxide to get it, now through structure you're creating white. So a peacock does not have blue feathers? No, no color. Hold on. It has melanin, which it uses for structure, and also it's brown, so it makes the colors pop. And this is what's really cool too is that

The feather is made out of keratin. It's the same stuff that's your hair and your skin and your nails, keratin. It's a protein. But the way it lays it up, it designs it in such a way that it reflects the color yellow, amplifies the color yellow, you know, yellowish.

Light rays come in, they go through the layers and they're amplified or refracted back to you as the color yellow. A few millimeters over, it's the color blue. You know, it's not a pigment so it doesn't fade and it's four times brighter than pigment.

Yeah. But so, okay, I'm still stuck on the peacock. Okay. Sorry. So if I put the peacock into a dark place, is it then no longer blue and green? Correct. It needs light. It's literally a trick of the light. It's like, you know, when you have oil, you know, in water and you see that rainbow of colors, those colors aren't really there. It's the way the water and oil are interacting in layers to

bounce back a brighter color in certain areas. You've said that the discovery of fire is overrated. What do you mean by that? Well, specifically how we have turned to

Fire and high heats and high combustion in our manufacturing processes. And also, of course, in the way we now power ourselves, right? It's combustion of fossil fuels. And in every manufacturing facility, you're wearing hard hats, ear guards, eye guards, and temperature sensitive gloves because...

The recipe for most of the things we make is called heat-beaten treat, is what material scientists call it. You heat up a chemical formulation, for instance, to very high temperatures and high pressures, and you use toxic chemicals to make or break those bonds. So that sort of volcanic mimicry...

It's not only energy intensive, but it's not life friendly. And it's also not the way we see manufacturing in the rest of the natural world, which, you know, I would posit that these organisms are the consummate chemists.

You know, you walk into a forest and it's a manufacturing facility. Like, you cannot believe, you know, miracle materials being made every second. Nature can make hard materials like corals or seashells without heat or fire, a lot of times using the ingredients that are around them, like dissolved CO2 and calcium.

processes that are happening seemingly without effort, but that are hard for us to imitate. You know, the challenge is that your chemistry has to be more elegant. And what I mean by that is that my friend John Warner, who's a green chemist, he calls it letting molecules do what they actually want to do.

So what happens in the natural world is a lot of self-assembly. You know, I imagine, you know, blocks thrown out onto the floor and they've got positive and negative charges and so they automatically sort of magnetically come together, right? That's self-assembly. Whereas what we tend to do is heat them up and give them large doses of forcing them to a solution, right? So what the challenge is, is to find the molecules, right?

that are going to come together naturally and giving them the conditions that they want to come together naturally. It's a different kind of chemistry than forcing them. As there's more and more and more of us on this planet, we've got to start living in a way where we're feeding the systems that in turn support us. And in order to get ourselves into that new paradigm,

It is best for us to study healthy places and to try to mimic what is happening here. That's science writer Janine Benyus. She's the author of several books, including Biomimicry, Innovation Inspired by Nature. She's also the co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute. Guess what's the second most used substance in the world after water? It's concrete. It's the most common building material worldwide.

Concrete is made from cement, which is made by heating and grinding up limestone and other materials, a process that requires a lot of energy. Making cement is responsible for 8% of the world's carbon emissions. A North Carolina company called Biomason is trying to make cement without heat by copying how corals form their structures.

Grant Hill has more. It seems like concrete is the building block of our modern existence. Think sprawling gray structures towering over cities, highway ramps, bridges, and parking lots.

it's been around for a long time. You can find early versions in the floors of ancient Greek palaces and the walls of Mayan ruins. And there's good reason for that. Concrete is strong, durable, and flexible. It can withstand temperature changes and moisture, and it can be poured into any shape because it starts out as a thick gray slurry when you mix water with cement. In the

In the raw materials of cement, you have different elements that are normally found in nature as rocks, and those include calcium, alumina,

iron, and silica. That's Camilo Restrepo. He's the CEO of Biomason. He says the rocks are ground up into a fine powder and then heated to high temperatures to force a chemical reaction, turning calcium carbonate into calcium oxide, or quicklime, so that the powder later binds with water and hardens.

It takes a lot of energy to make this reaction happen. And the reaction itself releases CO2. It's an amazing material, but there has to be a better way around it, right? There has to be a better way for society to be able to make the same quality of life that we currently have without impacting the environment in such a way that we're currently doing.

Biomason's approach takes a page from corals, which turn dissolved CO2 in seawater into calcium carbonate and uses this chalky substance to build their skeleton. That same coral structure over many, many hundreds or millions of years becomes limestone.

Rather than using this end product of corals, grinding it up, heating it up, and forcing it into a chemical reaction to make calcium oxide, which releases CO2. In our case, we do almost the opposite. That's Biomason's chief scientific officer, Aristos Aristoudou.

Their cement is based on calcium carbonate, which, again, is carbon dioxide mixed with calcium, a key building block for corals, sea urchins, or shells to make those hard materials. So we actually capture the CO2 and deposit it in the concrete, which can last literally for hundreds or even thousands of years. This is an ideal way to do carbon capture and storage while producing something of value for

Their process also reduces the energy requirements because it doesn't need the high heat to set the chemical reaction in motion. Instead, they use bacteria.

to do the work. - So the bacteria is a proprietary organism that was isolated from nature. That's pretty much what I can tell you. I mean, Biomason has spent literally years to collect environmental samples that may contain bacterial interest. It comes down to how well they grow,

because we need to grow them obviously and produce them at a very large scale. How well you can preserve them because we need to grow them and preserve them and be able to transport them to our manufacturing facilities and use them directly in our process. Their biocement turns into bioconcrete that can withstand the same pressures as traditional concrete.

a material that is durable and flexible. Camilo showed me the product the company has available on the market now, rectangular tiles about the size of a pillow. And this is a bio-concrete tile, bio-cement tile that can be installed in floors. For listeners at home, you know, usually I try to describe what things look like because we're, you know, on the radio. It looks like a concrete floor tile.

There's nothing real different about it. You would never know. So to that same expression, and that's perfect. That's my expectation all the time, right? We recently showcased an installation of 160 square meters of tiles in the Tower Bridge Court in London. So this is a renovation of a building. The tiles were installed in an elevator lobby during Climate Week.

Ideally, their product looks, feels, and acts exactly like the materials we have now.

but is far more sustainable to produce. It's a natural replacement for cement and for concrete.

That story was reported by Grant Hill. We're talking about biomimicry, the quest to imitate some of nature's most ingenious design concepts. Coming up, could squid teach us a thing or two about gene therapy? So we're trying to understand the tricks that the cephalopods are using so we can apply it to the human system. That's next on The Pulse.

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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about biomimicry, the idea of looking to nature to study and learn from some of the most astounding processes that happen all around us.

Squids are pretty amazing creatures. They can release ink when they are threatened. They are fast swimmers. They can change color to adapt to their surroundings. But there's something else they do that's very impressive. They can manipulate and edit their own genetic material at high rates. Scientists are studying squid to see if they could point researchers toward new treatment options for human illnesses. Karen Brown reports.

It's a beautiful morning in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on the southwest corner of Cape Cod. I'm here to meet Josh Rosenthal, a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, which is perched above an active dock. And this is the Gemma. That's the name of a 50-foot research vessel that's about to go out for the day. We usually go between Woods Hole and Martha's Vineyard.

The crew catches marine animals that scientists study to help understand basic biology. They're known as model organisms. Today, they'll be on the lookout for cephalopods. Think squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. Squid are the most relevant to Josh's research.

When we get to the building where the previously caught animals are held, he sticks his hand into a holding tank and picks up what looks like a roll of translucent jelly. It's filled with squid eggs. You can see when the animals come in, they immediately will start laying egg fingers. You see those little jelly-like fingers down there? Those are each filled with 50 to 100 eggs.

They won't be eggs for long. One of the remarkable things about this species of squid is how quickly they can grow, about eight months from tiny hatchling to a 10- or 20-inch adult.

But squid growth rate is not his focus. Josh researches how genetics affect behavior, disease, and physical sensations. Squid and octopus are by far the most behaviorally sophisticated invertebrate. He says their large, complex nervous systems rival many mammals, which is in part related to their RNA.

RNA is the molecule that carries instructions from DNA, the body's genetic blueprint, into the cells to make proteins. For a long time, scientists thought that transfer of information was always pretty direct, that the DNA was converted into an identical version of itself in RNA. But we know now that that's not always true and that actually the information itself can be edited. Encephalopods do something interesting here.

They edit their own RNA at unusually high rates, meaning they actually change the genetic message en route to the protein. While the DNA may instruct the organism to make a certain protein in a certain way, the RNA can change those instructions on the fly and tell the cells to do it differently. And it seems to be going on in all organisms, but just thousands of times more frequently in squid and octopus and cuttlefish, too.

When translated to humans, this process could have great therapeutic significance. For instance, scientists could learn how to edit a message that comes from a mutated gene, one that causes disease or dysfunction, and fix it. Essentially, you're replacing a bad gene with a good gene, but not in the DNA, in the RNA. So we're trying to understand the tricks that the cephalopods are using so we can apply it to the human system, and how we can use RNA editing for...

you know, basically RNA-based therapeutics. RNA is hot right now in biochemistry, but the general public is only just learning about it. We all heard about it with the messenger RNA in COVID vaccines. Instead of injecting a protein into a person's arm, the vaccine essentially injects instructions via RNA for the body to make its own protein, in this case, one from the COVID virus. The body then creates antibodies to fight it.

Josh says unlike gene editing like CRISPR, RNA editing is temporary. By editing the information in RNA, you can have those changes appear for a while, but then go away. You can start again. And why would an organism want that? Because environment, both the social environment and the physical environment, changes, right? So you might not want your change permanently. It might be only you.

Craig Martin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says the RNA approach offers more flexibility than trying to edit DNA.

If we develop an RNA therapeutic and then later on somebody comes along with something better, we can just replace that therapeutic with the better thing that comes along. Josh Rosenthal was so optimistic about this technique that in 2019 he pitched it to a group of venture capitalists in Cambridge and started a biotech company called Coro. The company's scientists are now using RNA editing to work on a genetic disease of the liver and lung.

And last month, another company called Wave Therapeutics announced it successfully edited RNA in humans with a liver disease to great fanfare in the field. The sample size was very small, only two people, but the effects lasted for a couple months with no side effects.

Those are some big picture ideas. But Josh has his eyes on another use for RNA, something that could address one of the country's biggest health problems, pain relief. And it just stands to reason if you're working with an organism like squid that can do this way better than any other organism, edit genetic information, then it makes sense that that might be useful for a therapeutic application like deadening pain.

At the moment, he says the most effective short-term treatment for severe pain is opiates. But they're, you know, horribly addictive and they cause, you know, in many, many cases, worse problems down the line. So there's a really urgent need for coming up with alternatives to opiate. Josh's lab is focusing on a part of the nervous system called the nociceptive system.

That's the system that recoils through stimulated nerve fibers when you experience something extreme, like the heat of a flame or the pain of arthritic inflammation. But I'm interested in the pain because it involves...

Not correcting a genetic mistake mutation, but really rationally going in and then saying, ha ha, we want to change a specific protein the way it operates a little bit. In other words, they're hoping to mimic how squid and octopus use RNA editing in pain-related nerve channels.

and to use that knowledge to manipulate human cells. We want to try to re-engineer a protein in these nociceptor neurons to be less likely to generate pain signals. It's temporary, but it's a longer duration effect. Josh has teamed up with pain researchers at Yale, the University of Texas Dallas, and Tel Aviv University.

They've been funded by a five-year, $6 million NIH grant earmarked for addressing the addiction crisis. For The Pulse, I'm Karen Brown. Earlier on, we heard from biologist Alyssa Stark, who studies geckos and how they stick to surfaces. She has the geckos in her lab, but she also travels and climbs trees to study ants, which also have admirable sticking powers.

I study tropical ants because I'm really interested in these extreme environments and these are getting hotter, these environments, and changing in the tropics as well. I work in Panama mostly to do this work and I really focus on canopy ants, so ants that live in the tops of trees.

about 100 feet up or so. And so I climb up there, my colleagues and I do, and we collect different types of ants. And so for me, the diversity of species is quite fascinating because

There's hundreds of different ant species in the tops of these trees in the tropics that you might never see. They only live up there. So when you get up there, the adhesives of these ants are specific to really hot surfaces in particular. So a lot of the work that we've done is measuring how hot is it

for an ant and they're so tiny that their whole body often is in this heated boundary layer and certainly their feet are walking on these hot surfaces. And so they have a chemical adhesive, they have a glue that can maintain adhesion in a variety of contexts, especially these hot surfaces, which could be useful for bio-inspired design. How do you have an adhesive that can stay stuck on something that gets really, really hot?

And ants that are, I focus on the worker ants, so they don't have wings. So there's no backup plan. They're not like a beetle or another insect that, you know, if they fall, they can use their wings to fly. So I feel like ants are a great system because there's no backup option. Some ants can glide and at least land on the same tree they fell from, but that's about it.

I never thought of ants in terms of being sticky. Like I thought of them as, you know, having these elaborate systems and society isn't carrying pine needles, but I never thought of them as being sticky.

Yeah, a lot of people don't, which I think is interesting. And I'm trying to remember if before I started working on ants, if I felt that way too. But most likely when they're in your kitchen, right? And they're climbing on the walls or there's maybe an ant trail that's going in into your pantry from the wall and going down. That's adhesion. That's a vertical substrate that they are walking on and it's probably pretty smooth. So ants do have claws, but...

Many ants also have this soft, compliant, smooth pad in between their claws, and it's coated with a glue. And so that's what allows them to adhere. And some ants, there's a lot of diversity. Some have very big pads, some have small pads or no pads if they're on the ground.

And their claws also differ in shape and size as well. So for them, what I find is interesting about them is they're probably very well designed to fit exactly the needs of what they do in their environment. And it's very competitive in the rainforest for resources. So they need to be really good at what they do. Alyssa says there's also a lot of interest in imitating other aspects of ant life.

There is actually a biomimicry component that is now more focused on social structures and using things like the way ants move resources in their colony from one location to another or the way they even communicate or other organisms and even plants and things like that. How do living things communicate? How do they move products? How do they

develop and design larger structures? How do they build an actual nest? Things like that, that can actually be used by architects, by leaders in their companies to better structure the actual social component of their company.

as well. And so I think we're actually a lot of movement on the biomimicry and is starting to head that direction as well. So again, not just making some cool new product, but actually solving the way our companies work and our systems work so that it's more efficient, as well as actually probably more friendly towards us because after all, we are animals and we are not separate from that. So biomimicry does apply to us as well.

That's Alyssa Stark. She's an assistant professor of biology at Villanova University near Philadelphia, where she heads the Stark Lab. Coming up, how far are we in the decade-long quest to do what plants do so effortlessly, harnessing the sun? The concept of an artificial leaf is beautiful. It's inspiring. That's next on The Pulse.

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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about biomimicry, studying nature to understand and replicate some of its brilliant processes. About 10 years ago, there was a lot of excitement about research projects trying to make an artificial leaf.

The idea is to make a device that, like a leaf, can harness energy from sunlight to produce fuel. An artificial leaf would not only have a low carbon footprint, it would actually use up carbon dioxide just like a real plant. How has this research progressed? Alan Yu has more.

More than 10 years ago, Miguel Modestino was a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, with a dream of turning solar energy into fuel to replicate what leaves do. Leaves use sunlight to break water into hydrogen and oxygen.

They combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to produce sugar, which is fuel for a plant to grow. The goal with an artificial leaf is to do the same thing, but instead of sugar, it would produce fuel that humans could use as a power source.

I checked in with Miguel to see where he's at when it comes to achieving that vision. He is now an associate professor of chemical engineering at New York University. The concept of an artificial leaf is beautiful. It's inspiring. It's one of the reasons why I first joined my research group. Engineering is not always pretty and inspiring.

but it's focused on getting something done and getting something done as efficiently and as good as you can. And his challenge is to make not just a device that works, but one that is profitable, works on a large scale, and can become a viable alternative to fossil fuel energy. So you start with a vision and idea, and those ideas take shape and forms that you really never predicted.

After finishing his PhD, Miguel joined a research group in Switzerland to keep working on the artificial leaf.

One of the first challenges was to break up the work a leaf does. Leaves collect sunlight and produce hydrogen. But the artificial leaf would have to have two parts, one for each job. That's because for every square centimeter the machine uses to make hydrogen, it needs 100 square centimeters of space to collect sunlight.

which means it is most efficient to have a relatively small part to make the hydrogen and a much larger part to collect sunlight. If we do that, then it makes no sense to integrate every single thing into one component that looks like a leaf. He worked on this for years. His team got to the point of making a device the size of a shoebox, which they continue to work on.

Miguel eventually left Switzerland for New York University. That's where he worked on another hurdle: the kinds of fuels that are already available are cheap. Clean fuels do the same function as dirty fuels, and that just means that you need to compete on very similar markets. And fuel markets are hyper-competitive. Hydrogen produced by artificial leaves is not cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels like oil and natural gas.

So he cast around for something other than hydrogen that he could make with an artificial leaf-like device. In particular, he wants to make something with his device that can compete with their fossil fuel counterparts when it comes to price. He landed on nylon. Nylon is a high-value polymer material. It's used very broadly. It's one of the main fibers, synthetic fibers used...

for clothing, for fashion. Nylon is a popular fabric, especially for things like swimsuits or workout clothes. Right now, companies make nylon from crude oil. Miguel is working on how to make nylon with solar power and materials that can be grown, not fossil fuels. There have been tremendous developments, some of them pushing the artificial leaf concept forward.

and some of them branching out in directions that are different, but leading to advances in many other different fields. And also taking us a step closer to the final goal, which is, you know, to have abundant, inexpensive, renewable energy deployed everywhere across society. One of the people who inspired Miguel to work on this is Dan Nocera. He's one of the researchers who really popularized the concept of an artificial leaf.

Dan is a chemist and a professor of energy at Harvard University. And he hit the same kinds of challenges that Miguel encountered. Dan also found that making hydrogen from an artificial leaf was not as cheap as the fossil fuels they wanted to replace. So he pivoted to adapting the technology and doing something else with it. We realized that

Rather than splitting water, if I could put two compounds in a glass of water and not split the water, actually put the electricity into the compounds, I could make a thing called a flow battery.

It's called a flow battery because it has two tanks of liquid chemicals. Giving them electricity makes the chemicals react in one direction. And reversing the flow of chemicals will produce an electric current. The electricity to sustain this chemical reaction comes from solar panels.

So Dan's artificial leaf idea became a battery project, then a factory making big flow batteries, and then defense contractor Lockheed Martin bought the battery technology in 2014. A groundbreaking ceremony was held at the site of Fort Carson's new GridStar large flow battery energy storage demonstration system at the Minnick Electronics Center.

The army base in Fort Carson, Colorado started building a flow battery two years ago that would be big enough to power hundreds of homes. With Lockheed Martin taking over the battery work, Dan looked around for other ways to use his research to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. He learned that some of our carbon dioxide emissions come from making fertilizer to grow food.

And the research he worked on could also be used to make fertilizer. He started with genetically engineering bacteria. We told it to be like a hibernating bear.

take the hydrogen from water, solar water splitting, take carbon dioxide, and make this energy-rich biopolymer and store it. He uses solar energy to produce hydrogen, which the bacteria take in, along with carbon dioxide. Like a bear eating extra before a long winter, this bacteria takes in a lot of the hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

They become sort of obese on energy. You can look at the bacteria and they get all puffed up. He can put these puffed up bacteria into the ground where they decompose and become fertilizer. The company he founded now makes and sells this fertilizer at the same cost of commercial fertilizer. This is the kind of progress that physicist Varun Sivaram was hoping to see. Sometime this century,

He's a senior fellow for energy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He wrote a book on solar energy called Taming the Sun, where he checked in on the progress of various solar energy projects around the world. I'm just delighted that since I published Taming the Sun in 2018, the cost of solar electricity has fallen precipitously.

And we're already now down to below 10 cents a watt for a solar panel, a level I thought unthinkable just about a decade ago. Back when he wrote his book, Varun was already hopeful about seeing not just solar panels, but solar refineries that could make clean fuel and chemical products from solar energy.

Dan and Miguel and other scientists are doing that kind of work now. The biggest problem, in Varun's opinion, is that it is not happening fast enough. He says there's a joke in the clean energy space that for decades and decades, people have said nuclear fusion is 10 years away. The artificial leaf, I hope, does not fall into this trap.

Because the artificial leaf has had a great deal of promises, these photoelectrochemical cells, for multiple decades now. And yet, if you ask me today, it still feels like we're a decade away from these technologies being truly commercially competitive, if not longer. I don't think we can afford that. But that part is out of the hands of scientists like Miguel and Dan. This is what you do as a scientist. You invent and create things.

and it gives people and society more options. But once I've done that as a scientist, it's out of my control

if they choose that option or not. Since the 1900s as a society, we've invested hundreds of trillions of dollars into an energy infrastructure. There is no scientist who's going to come up with something in their lab tonight that replaces a $100 trillion paid-off energy infrastructure. So that's just reality. That story was reported by Alan Yu.

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland family and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tan. Julianne Koch is our intern. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.

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