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14 Smart Inventions Inspired by Nature: Biomimicry - Bloomberg

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14 Smart Inventions Inspired by Nature: Biomimicry - Bloomberg

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14 Smart Inventions Inspired by Nature: Biomimicry

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Companies seeking breakthrough products tend to ignore the greatest invention machine in the universe: life’s more than three-billion-year history of evolution by natural selection.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bPMHSu9D1oYCAAtZj3m_ispEK2NcKgZtRmYQ8dEVs3Y/edit

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u0ZEdw7x-sFjv-J4j5QOFWPyh06g5JlUmymgoIrTK88/edit

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Sharklet: A biotech startup fights germs with sharks - May. 31, 2013

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Sharklet: A biotech startup fights germs with sharks - May. 31, 2013

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Forget chemicals or pills in the fight against nasty bacterial infections. Entrepreneur Mark Spiecker is betting that the secret lies with sharks.

Those fast and carnivorous fish just happen to have microscopic textures on their skin that make them highly resistant to barnacles, algae and, surprisingly, most human bacteria.

Spiecker is CEO of a six-year-old company called Sharklet Technologies that has copied those mathematical patterns to create germ-deflecting surfaces for everything from medical devices to computer keyboards.

The textures are invisible to the eye -- and to the finger. Measured in microns, the surface ridges are about 1/10th the width of a human hair. Depending on the specific bug, they cut bacteria by 90% to 99.99%, according to Spiecker.

Backed by $5.2 million from investors, the 14-employee firm has attracted nine customers, including office furniture maker Steelcase and medical device maker Cook Medical. The company has collected $2.6 million in federal research & development grants, and last year, its sales reached $1 million.

Sharklet's technology sits smack in the middle of a burgeoning field called "biomimicry," which explores how nature can be copied to solve human problems.

Bacterial resistance is an especially hot topic, thanks to growing concerns about the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections. In 1976, only 5% of staph infections were resistant. Today, more than half are, meaning they're tougher to treat and far more deadly. Scientists are studying everything from kangaroos' stomachs to leafcutter ants to glean the natural world's antibacterial secrets.

If the patterns found in sharkskin actually work in the human medical world, the breakthrough could be big, says Steve Brozak, who tracks the medical device industry as president of investment services firm WBB Securities in New Jersey. "Sharklet's technology could be important today and could be absolutely necessary tomorrow," he says.

So how do you go from ancient ocean creatures to a disruptive medical technology? Sharklet's story began in 2000, when the U.S. Navy asked University of Florida materials science professor Anthony Brennan to find a way to reduce the drag on Navy ships from barnacles and algae.

Related story: How whale song inspired an oceanic robot army

At a Hawaiian conference, Brennan and his fellow researchers stood on a pier by the water talking through the problem. Brennan wondered aloud why whales have barnacles on their skin but sharks do not. His colleagues brushed off the question, saying that sharks simply swam too fast.

The answer didn't satisfy Brennan. "My friend looked at me and said, 'I'll catch a shark for you if you want,'" he says. One month later, as promised, he opened a package containing a mold of shark scales taken from the shark his buddy had caught and released.

In laboratory tests, Brennan discovered his theory was right: The sharks' skin repelled 85% of the algae. But it took another five years before Brennan serendipitously discovered that the resistance also worked on human pathogens. A student accidentally tried --and failed -- to grow bacteria on a sharkskin-patterned petri dish.

"It was difficult for us to figure out why it works," Brennan says. "And we still don't completely understand, but we have theories."

University officials wanted Brennan to commercialize his discovery, but he didn't want to be an entrepreneur. Eventually, he called a friend and businessman named Greg Garvis, who came to Florida with a pair of business strategists. The three men were blown away.

"We knew it was important technology as soon as we saw it," says Joe Bagan, one of the advisors.

In October 2007, the four partners started Sharklet Technologies, which was soon financed by $1.2 million from investors. Brennan signed on as chief scientific officer. Bagan became the company's first CEO.

The new startup faced a big problem right away: Getting the patterns to work in the laboratory is one thing, but how do you mass-produce a texture that's 3 millionths of a meter deep?

Sharklet's executives spent two years searching for people who could help them solve that problem. They visited medical device trade shows, talked to semiconductor manufacturers and met endlessly with experts in photolithography, microreplication and laser etching. At times, they doubted the company would survive, says Spiecker, who was the chief operating officer at the time.

"A lot of people said we just couldn't do it," he says. "We were pushing the limits of manufacturing technology."

Finally, Spiecker found a Massachusetts company called FLEXCon that agreed to make the tooling to manufacture large sheets of textured plastic. He also found 10x Microstructures in Chicago, which could make tools for molded parts featuring Sharklet's texture.

From there, momentum grew as word spread of the shark-fueled breakthrough. Makers of telephones, countertops and medical devices began calling, and private and institutional investors took notice, backing the idea with another $4 million.

Sharklet must still prove its texture will work in human medical trials, but it intends to start manufacturing non-medical products next year. That includes furniture for Steelcase like desks for college classrooms and shared offices. Steelcase vice president Sara Armbruster likes the idea of using something other than chemical coatings to promote wellbeing.

"There is a simplicity to it," Armbruster says. "It's nontoxic, and it's coming right out nature."

CNNMoney () First published May 31, 2013: 4:59 AM ET

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Sharklet: A biotech startup fights germs with sharks

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Those fast and carnivorous fish just happen to have microscopic textures on their skin that make them highly resistant to barnacles, algae and, surprisingly, most human bacteria. Spiecker is CEO of a six-year-old company called Sharklet Technologies that has copied those mathematical patterns to create germ-deflecting surfaces for everything from medical devices to computer keyboards.

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Submarines of the future speed through the water with the help of wiggling fish fins. Aircraft ascend through the clouds with flapping wings. In the desert, a climber steadily approaches the summit of a cliff, open palms effortlessly sticking to rock with the use of gecko-inspired nanotechnology. You've probably only encountered such nature-inspired future technologies in the imagined worlds of science fiction and comic books, but the design approach already exists. Inventors and engineers have been looking to nature for inspiration ever since prehistoric times.

Early humans learned hunting, shelter and survival techniques by observing animals as they interacted with their surroundings. While humans lacked the fierce claws and superior hunting instinct of bears, people could mimic their techniques. And as humans began to design ever-more complicated contraptions, they continued to look to nature's example. From Leonardo da Vinci's 15th-century sketches of flying machines to the Wright brothers' first successful prototype four centuries later, dreams of human flight centered on observing birds.

The world is full of amazing biological innovations, each one the product of millions of years of evolution. When designing technologies, it only makes sense to study the ways in which nature has already mastered the challenges involved. Today, we know this as biomimetics or biomimicry -- the practice of imitating models in nature to create better forms, processes, systems and strategies.

You encounter examples of biomimicry every day, perhaps without even realizing it. Velcro technology, for instance, was inspired by the way burred seed pouches cling to animal fur. Modern hypodermic needles take a few pointers from rattlesnake fangs. Nike has even applied the qualities of goat hoof traction to their running shoe designs.

In this article, we'll explore the ways in which biomimicry bridges the disciplines of biology and engineering, using the innovations of the natural world to improve technology and design.

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Submarines of the future speed through the water with the help of wiggling fish fins. Aircraft ascend through the clouds with flapping wings. In the desert, a climber steadily approa­ches the summit of a cliff, open palms effortlessly sticking to rock with the use of gecko-inspired nanotechnology.

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The world’s best creative director: Nature |

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The world’s best creative director: Nature |

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What's that too-often quoted aphorism? "Good artists copy; great artists steal"? In this nuanced conversation, biologist and founder of Biomimicry 3.8 Janine Benyus speaks with Tim Brown, chief executive of IDEO, to discuss what's really interesting about borrowing.

Tim Brown: As a creative person, I've always believed that I can't be creative unless I'm inspired in some way. Inspiration is a funny thing; it sounds like it's an internal thing. We think of great creative artists and imagine that inspiration wells up inside of them, but I think that's just not true. Inspiration comes from the outside. The most inspirational people are the most observant people who are able to take from the outside world and convert what they see into something that drives their creativity. The simplest and most effective way of doing that is to notice things, and to notice those things that might be relevant to the thing you're thinking about or the problem you're trying to solve or the idea that you're working with. There are countless cliche examples of this, everyone from Picasso to Leonardo, people we think of as being individually creative geniuses who in fact were extremely good at taking inspiration from the outside world and having it drive their own creative engine. Borrowing from the outside world is at the heart of all things we do creatively to be inspired.

Then, the challenges we tackle as designers are always multifaceted; they are systemic in nature, not simple. In order to tackle them with any degree of comprehension we have to look at them from a multidisciplinary perspective, look at them from many different directions, through many different lenses. So we're not just borrowing from other disciplines, we're actually applying those disciplines. I think often what we do as designers is attempt to glue a whole bunch of other disciplines together to look at something creatively. We take business, science and technology, the human disciplines of social science... I personally borrow ideas from those places, and much more importantly I am also interested in how we bring them all together as collaborators.

Janine Benyus: That feels like it goes right to the heart of it. Obviously biomimicry is borrowing nature's blueprints, recipes and processes, borrowing ecosystem strategies and then coming up with design principles to solve our own problems. When I started in this field about 15 years ago, there wasn't really a name for this method of innovating, and I remember I found that so strange. We used to live much closer to the ecosystem and when we admired species that we saw, we mimicked them. So Native Americans saw the snowshoe hare with its big back feet and made snowshoes that exactly mimicked how they allowed it to float on top of snow. So there's obviously a long history of it, but why isn't it systematized? Why isn't there, in other words, a science around this? There are very deep methodologies around learning about nature, but not about learning from nature.

So when I look at our relationship with the natural world, I think biomimicry signals something very new for western industrial culture. Our relationships with the natural world are around what we can extract, what we can harvest, what we can domesticate. Look through the literature, and we know all about crop plants and livestock, and we know about pests, things that bother us. But until recently we hadn't studied organisms so that we might learn from them. So I think it's a new relationship, and it's also one that is powerful for another reason. If you're not domesticating, harvesting, or extracting, if you're just borrowing an idea, that means the organism stays out there in the wild, and so it's the least damaging thing you can do.

TB: That expands to thinking about how we borrow and are inspired by nature's systems, those things that aren't necessarily 'living' in the traditional sense of the world. I think of the weather system, for instance, and the overlap with the science of complexity. More and more I'm seeing that we can look at, wonder about and be inspired by things from many different perspectives. One way is to look directly at the specific octopus or mollusk; another is to begin to understand some of the principles of physics from which those natural systems were built. Because unless you're of a certain religious perspective, they weren't actually designed by anybody but they emerged from complex systems in seemingly magical ways.

JB: We work with so-called life's principles. As scientists, we looked and saw all this incredible diversity: 'wow, that organism can fly at that speed and live without oxygen for three hours!' There are all those individual technologies - and 30 million species! So we wanted to know if there's anything that all or even most species have in common. Because that would be an operating manual for how to live on earth. So we began to collect them. And now we work with these principles as a filter. Some of them look at how complex adaptive systems grew to be sustainable or actually enhance their place; they're almost a buildup of rule sets. And actually, that intrigues me when I think about your work at IDEO. How do you guys make generations of products before they have to go out into the wild? You make stuff, and then you have to select what will live or die. How might things like a list of life's principles be used to choose the things that will bring us toward better adaptation on the planet? Do you think about stuff like that?

TB: Yes, we do. Not so much the principles that you're talking about, although it sounds like we should be thinking about them a lot more, but I think you bring up a very important point. The simplistic view of borrowing is that you see a solution here and you apply that solution there. And that works sometimes, but it doesn't work very often. We see this in our work when we're doing ethnographic and anthropological work. You'll see an instance of somebody doing something interesting; they're an extreme user, they're hacking the system somehow. The obvious thing is to just take that solution and apply it wherever you're looking to solve a problem. But it turns out that very rarely works. What you actually have to do is to abstract out what it is you're learning from that solution, understand what the principles are, understand perhaps what the strategies are, and then from there reformulate the right solution for the circumstances that you're talking about. This process of spotting, seeing, observing and then abstracting - and then from that abstraction being able to create multiple potential solutions - is an important subtlety when it comes to this idea of borrowing. Ideas don't just shoot across from the moment you saw an interesting new idea straight through to a solution. Instead, we go through this elevated process of abstraction to the point where we've got a set of principles through which we can design many different potential answers.

JB: Very much so! When people talk about biomimicry, they constantly ask questions like, 'why would you want reinvent things like the spider?' And that's not it at all. We look at the spider and we extract a design principle from it. Or the Namibian beetle that can create water out of fog. You're not going to recreate the shell, but you realize that there's a design principle for how to do it. It's a platform.

TB: A great example of this is the work Neri Oxman is doing at MIT. She's taking the principles of the way silkworms produce their silk, which can be both a very soft material or a very hard material, and she's exploring the kinds of things you can do by applying those principles. She's not just trying to make industrial-sized, mechanical silkworms.

JB: Exactly! And the thing that makes Neri's work really powerful is to figure out how nature makes what we call functional gradients, so you go from a piece of fiber being very stretchy to a piece of fiber being very hard. That's done with different titrations of the exact same material. So as she puts that different structure function catalog together, and you add 3D printing to the mix, suddenly you're able to dial in the function you want, using a common raw material that normally you'd think might not be strong enough. That becomes a platform for manufacturing in a new way. The thing to do now is to get deep biological catalogs in place for 3D printing.We'll do that not by looking at one organism, but by looking across, from 'amoeba through zebra.'

TB: It's interesting. This ability to move from the specific to the general through figuring out what the principles are is a fundamental part of the creative process. But it's something that's often missed when we have this discussion about how we're inspired from the outside world or how we borrow ideas.

JB: I remember being at an event in San Diego, and there were a bunch of people from biomimetic companies on a panel. One of them talked about finding a 3D Fibonacci sequence - everywhere. It's in the cochlear of your ear, it's in your veins, it's found in tree tracheids. It's how water is able to move quickly through capillaries. That shape itself is a platform technology. And so now that company can make fans, blowers, pipes that move water better... Also on the panel was a guy from Regen Energy, and he was talking about using swarm technology. He was so excited to apply that technology to other, new ideas. Once you get a platform, that's when it becomes very powerful.

TED: Tim, you've hired biologists and those with all sorts of backgrounds at IDEO. How do you integrate a few people with the depths of knowledge that Janine is describing into the company - and how do you make sure their ideas are fostered and nurtured and not just seen as a happy, interesting, weird sideline?

TB: It's actually really difficult, and I would say we're less successful than I'd like us to be, even though we keep doing it. We're not a huge organization by global standards, but we're big enough, 600 people, and when you come in with a very specific set of expertise, there's immediately a tension: 'What is the right thing to do?' Should people remain expert in what they do? In which case they're basically on their own, as there aren't other similar people in the organization. Or should they, as we say, go native and essentially turn themselves into a designer? In which case their skillset is essentially lost and certainly no longer deepening. We've run across that problem with scientists, with all kinds of people where it's unlikely that we're going to have 50 of them. The strategy, I think, and one that we have to keep working on, is you both bring people in as experts, and also build outside networks and collaborate. That's the way those experts stay deep in their field, and it's also the way we can create leverage and scale.

JB: We've gotten to that point as well, where I think we realize that we're not going to be able to stop everything and give everybody a deep knowledge of the biological world. People are not going to become biologists. What we think we need to do - and have started - is to create a "Biological Intelligence Service." The hope is to make this into a digital resource where people can look up any kind of function and come up with a lot of the biological strategies. It's early days right now, but I think we have to have biologists do something they haven't really done, which is to find patterns that then become useful as principles for design. It's the process we do for clients, but I think it has to be something that everybody can subscribe to. I want us to get to the point where we're in the tools people use every day, when biology is at that level of abstraction where it's useful. So you don't just learn that the beetle can comb water out of fog, you actually have a generative design program, an algorithm, that allows you to skin your train or your car with that particular shape, so you can wrap a building so that it too can comb water out of fog. The knowledge actually turns into a product that comes out of biological intelligence. So far in biology we've been in stamp-collecting mode; we've been very interested in cataloging the diversity of life and not that interested in cataloging its generalities. So this is new.

TB: What we also need, at least in order for designers to respond well to this, are the icons, if you like, the things that spark our imagination. And so as we begin to get designers, people like Neri, for instance, who are beginning to make exciting discoveries and expressing them in a creative, design-based way, that inspires other designers to think the same way. So it's one thing to have a library of solutions, another to have tools, algorithms, whatever else it might be that will help you match a need with a solution. Then I think we also need those things that inspire us and the examples that pull us toward this space, which means we need these crossover people. Neri's interesting because she's an architect and a scientist, so she's got both skills. Particularly in the early days, the translational difficulties that we have between designers and biologists get overcome by people who are somehow both things. They're few and far between, but when we find them, I think they play a really important role.

JB: Absolutely. They're the da Vincis.

TED: You've both been vocal about the need for both design and biomimicry to be used and applied to stop us from destroying the planet and ourselves. How do you see that movement progressing?

TB: Janine pointed at a bunch of the most interesting examples, but this idea that we might be discovering principles for making our own man-made world, and using mechanisms, principles and materials that are in themselves far more sustainable, because biology has figured out how to do that, that for me is the most exciting piece of it. There's also a piece that's harder to understand and harder to get your head around because it's much more complex, which is understanding the way that nature's systems and sustainable ecosystems actually work. That's why I think the science of complexity is so important. At the actionable level, this idea that we might be developing 3D printing materials that are both highly adaptable structurally and at the same time highly circular in their ability to be returned back to where they came from, that is where I think the great hope lies.

Of course, we've also got the rather small challenge of persuading the world's industries to completely retool the way they think about what they do. It took a couple hundred years to get to this point and we haven't got a couple hundred years to get to the next point, so that's a significant challenge. But certainly for me, even in the last couple years as I've started to see the possibilities for making in these new ways, I'm the most hopeful I've been that we might have an alternative. I'm not saying we're there yet, but this is not just about improving the state of the way we do things industrially today, but completely remaking it.

JB: I completely agree, and I think the circular economy piece is very interesting. But even once you agree that these materials are reusable, a lot of innovation has to happen everywhere along that line in order for that to happen. You have to start with materials that can be reconfigured, taken apart, unzipped - even before 3D printing comes online. We need to start thinking about the supply chain, of what we're putting in those printers. I think biomimicry has the design; the build files for those 3D printers can come from the natural world. Now we're also going to have to get nature's chemistry within those printers. And that's a huge and exciting challenge.
Note: This conversation was lightly edited. "Questions Worth Asking" is a TED editorial series; this week we asked the question, "Can I borrow that?" to dig into themes of cross-disciplinary innovation and idea-sharing. See also Seth Godin's op ed, "Why I want you to steal my ideas," a story about SkyBox Imaging, a company using unexpected technology to build a new type of satellite, and an interview with Suzanne Lee, who's mixing science, fashion and kombucha to extraordinary effect.

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The world's best creative director: Nature

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Tim Brown: As a creative person, I've always believed that I can't be creative unless I'm inspired in some way. Inspiration is a funny thing; it sounds like it's an internal thing. We think of great creative artists and imagine that inspiration wells up inside of them, but I think that's just not true.

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NOVA - Official Website | Can We Make It to Mars?

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NOVA - Official Website | Can We Make It to Mars?

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Can We Make It To Mars?

PBS Airdate: January 19, 2011

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON (Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History)>: Hi, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host of NOVA scienceNOW, where this season we're asking six big questions.

On this episode, Can We Make It to Mars?

We would love to take a walk on the Red Planet, but can we get there alive?

JERRY LINENGER (NASA Astronaut, 1992-1998): You can go from a perfect day to a very bad day that quickly.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: There's space rocks way faster than speeding bullets.

JERRY LINENGER: All of a sudden, I look and see the solar panel just joosh. Instant hole, this big.

SIGRID CLOSE (Researcher, Stanford University): This is why it's so dangerous to send out missions. They can take out a spacecraft.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And cosmic rays punching through our brains...

JERRY LINENGER: I would see a flash and flash, flash, flash.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: ...and our selves.

C. MICHAEL FOALE (NASA Astronaut): They are a bullet traveling at an enormous speed.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Researchers are spinning up some ingenious plans...

JANNA KAPLAN (Researcher ,Brandeis University): Don't let the force leave you.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: ...to keep astronauts safe, but will they work? And if astronauts do make it to Mars, what will they wear? Humans can't survive without a pressurized suit.

DAVA NEWMAN (Researcher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Basically, the gas in your lungs would boil.

DR. SMITH JOHNSTON (NASA Flight Surgeon): You would be dead very quickly.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: NASA astronaut Mike Massimino...

MIKE MASSIMINO (NASA Astronaut): I feel like an Italian sausage.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: ...looks into a revolutionary new idea to keep Mars explorers alive and kicking.

Also, would you eat a piece of meat that's been sitting around for eight years? I did!

This NASA lab is cooking up food for the long journey to Mars. Eating in space is already no picnic, but with or without gravity, some of the space meals are delicious.

Mmm, I like that.

But can they stay tasty all the way to Mars?

Now this looks nasty.

MICHELE PERCHONOK (NASA Food Scientist): That is.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: All that and more, on this episode of NOVA scienceNOW.

Four decades ago, humans first walked on the moon, satisfying our thirst for exploration. And now we're setting our sights on another rock out there: Mars.

A trip to the Red Planet would likely cover a half a billion miles, about a thousand times farther than the Apollo missions. A roundtrip could take two or three years, and one big challenge is surviving harsh conditions, including some we don't encounter here on Earth.

Here in the New Mexico desert, home to of all sorts of top-secret government projects, NASA has built one of the world's most powerful guns. Some 60 yards long, it targets spaceships, though not alien spaceships, our own.

The gun simulates cosmic collisions that will threaten astronauts traveling to Mars.

So, you guys call this a gun? But it looks nothing like a gun. I think of a gun, I think of handguns or rifles. How fast does a rifle bullet go?

DONALD HENDERSON (White Sands Test Facility): About 2,000 miles per hour.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And what do you pull out of this?

DONALD HENDERSON: Twenty-thousand miles per hour.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Twenty thousand miles an hour? That's fast.

The most surprising thing is not the gun's size or power, but its bullets.

These itty bitty things?

DONALD HENDERSON: Uh huh.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Twenty thousand miles an hour?

They represent a danger that could end a mission to Mars. Space is not as empty as you might think, but littered with small fragments of comets, asteroids and planets, called meteoroids. In the vacuum of space, they move at deadly speeds.

And NASA's huge gun demonstrates just how dangerous they can be. These metal plates represent the walls of an unshielded spacecraft.

DONALD HENDERSON: This is a half-inch projectile, and it was traveling at about 16,000 miles per hour. It made a hole in the front plate, and then a slightly larger hole.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It kept going?

DONALD HENDERSON: Yes.

So an astronaut could be right behind this wall.

And this...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Whoa.

DONALD HENDERSON: ...is what is left over. It is essentially...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Whoa.

DONALD HENDERSON: ...a shotgun blast.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: The speed of the impact shattered the bullet, and its debris smashed ever-larger holes in the inner walls. It's a sobering lesson for NASA.

Meteoroids have already knocked out or damaged numerous spacecraft, including the probe Mariner 4, which snapped the first close-up pictures of Mars in 1965.

After its fly-by...

SIGRID CLOSE: It ran into a cloud of meteoroids no bigger than the size of a grain of sand. And over the course of about 45 minutes, they were seeing thousands of impacts on the spacecraft.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Another meteoroid strike was witnessed by astronaut Jerry Linenger.

JERRY LINENGER: During my time on the Russian Space Station, all of a sudden, I look, in the corner of my eye, I see the solar panel just joosh, you know. Instant hole, this big.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If astronauts are to survive a mission to Mars, we have to find a way to protect them from meteoroids. And so, today, the gun will test new lightweight shielding for the walls of a Mars spaceship.

It doesn't look very protective. This is foam I can stick my finger in.

DONALD HENDERSON: But it's a smartly designed shield, because what happens is the velocity is so fast-of these projectiles-when they impact, the speed breaks it apart, and then the rest of this target will absorb the impact.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So will this shield stop a projectile going over 16,000 miles an hour?

To find out, the shield is bolted in the target chamber. Then air is pumped out, to replicate the vacuum of space. We head to the bunker below for protection while the gun gets fired.

CONTROLLER(NASA):Three, two, one.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That was cool.

And the result? Did the shield stop the bullet?

Well, obviously it went through.

CONTROLLER: Yup.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But just look at the inner wall:no penetration. Nothing came out the other side.

CONTROLLER: That's right, it worked.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: The layers of foam, metal and bulletproof materials pulverized the debris from the impact.

So this takes out all the energy of those projectiles.

DONALD HENDERSON: And it stops them.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So this is where astronauts can be? They can be cooking breakfast here. They're safe from the hazards of space.

Well, not really. Meteoroids are only one peril of many.

JERRY LINENGER: Systems failing, possibility of a fire, possibility of losing electrical power-you can go from a perfect day to a very bad day that quickly.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Some threats aren't so obvious. In fact, one of the biggest looks like harmless fun.

Many astronauts report that being weightless is what they love most about space.

CLAYTON ANDERSON (NASA Astronaut, 1992-1998): I would wake up in the morning and fly to breakfast; then I would fly to work. I could fly to the bathroom, and I even flew while I was going to the bathroom. I was Superman every single day.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But what feels good may not be so good for you, as Jerry Linenger discovered after spending five months in zero gravity on the Russian Space Station.

JERRY LINENGER: By the time I got back, I had about a 14 percent bone loss. Now that was isolated to hips, lower spine. And my strength level was probably 65 percent of what I went up there with.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: With no gravitational force to work against, your body not only doesn't need the same amount of muscle and bone, it starts breaking them down. As on Earth, so in space: use it or lose it. And exercise may not solve the problem.

JERRY LINENGER: I exercised two one-hour periods every day, religiously. And my personal experience is that the bone loss seems to keep going on and on.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And yet, there is a solution: artificial gravity, a force created by spinning.

You can see it in the sci-fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. And you can experience it right now, in this small, spinning room at Brandeis University, as I did, recently, with neurophysiologist Janna Kaplan.

JANNA KAPLAN: Notice how we talk to each other, but we don't look at each other.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, well, I want to look at you, but I feel...

JANNA KAPLAN: Don't!

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It's hard.

I'm trying to conduct a conversation, but I'm having trouble turning my head.

The rotation, you see, is generating a centrifugal force that pushes everything in the room away from its center, towards the wall. It makes me lean pretty oddly, but, far as my body is concerned, this force is no different from gravity. To move, I have to work against it.

Okay, now I've got to turn around.

JANNA KAPLAN: Now, turn around slowly. Try to peel off the wall.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And I mean work.

JANNA KAPLAN: Peel. Everything is a peeling motion.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No chance of muscles and bones wasting away around here.

JAMES LACKNER (Brandeis University): It's the centrifugal force which is pushing him backwards. So, he feels like he's got to fight so hard to get away from the wall. And he may feel as much as 30 percent heavier.

JANNA KAPLAN: Always feel the force.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: May the force be with me.

JANNA KAPLAN: Don't let the force leave you.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Now remember, this room is on Earth. So, spinning or not, our planet's own gravity is always pulling us downward. Meanwhile the artificial gravity pushes us backwards. The two forces combined make things hang in here at odd angles. And this is also why the room eventually makes some visitors a bit queasy.

But if I were free of real gravity, artificial gravity would have me jogging comfortably on the wall, just like they did in 2001.

Now, building a spinning spaceship isn't practical. But a small spinning room on board might suffice, giving astronauts an Earth-like exercise space to keep their bones and muscles from wasting away.

Though that's not to say Mars explorers will be safe-even remotely, because they'll still have to face the worst space danger of all, a danger astronauts see, simply by closing their eyes.

JERRY LINENGER: I used to sleep upside down, piece of Velcro around me. Close my eyes, and then I would see a flash and flash, flash, flash.

MICHAEL FOALE: You'd get this single point of light and then a big circle around it, right there in your brain.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: The flashes are caused by cosmic rays, subatomic particles, like protons, generated by exploding stars, far off in our galaxy. Traveling close to light-speed, these high-energy particles will pierce a spaceship and its astronauts, their retinas, their brains.

This doesn't happen on Earth, because our planet's atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from the constant barrage of cosmic radiation.

JERRY LINENGER: You go to Mars, you're going to get a very heavy radiation dose. There is no way to protect against that. You can't carry lead up into space in a wall that would be thick enough.

MICHAEL FOALE: There is not much to stop them because they are so energetic. They are a bullet traveling at an enormous speed.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Pelted by this highly destructive kind of radiation, D.N.A. breaks apart, predisposing the cell to cancer.

Research continues, but we have yet to find a practical defense against cosmic rays.

JERRY LINENGER: You go to Mars, you're raising your risk of cancer, lifelong. But there are always innate risks to space travel, and there's no way to get around them. And you just do your best to minimize those risks and control them where you can.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So we might be able to protect our Mars explorers from some of the dangers they will face, but only some. Yet, knowing all that, today's astronauts are undeterred.

PEGGY WHITSON (NASA Astronaut): In my mind, it's part of our genetic code that we should explore to see what's beyond the mountain. And I would love to be the first person to step on another planet.

ANDREW THOMAS (NASA Astronaut): Just imagine what that would be like. Everything you see would be completely alien to your experiences here on Earth. It would be just an amazing, amazing experience.

MICHAEL FOALE: I would go to Mars under any condition. I would dearly, dearly like to take my wife with me. Human evolution involves exploration.

JERRY LINENGER: And I don't care what the risk is. That's something, that you actually are moving mankind forward. It is worth your life, and I'd sign up for that mission in a heartbeat.

Meet the "water bear."

They're very small.

They can survive temperatures as low as -459°F.

>And as high as 257°F.

They can go without water and air for at least 10 days.

And many are able to survive radiation exposure.

It's the only animal that can survive the harsh conditions of space.

Sign them up, NASA.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: One thing obviously lacking in space is air. Now, of course, air is crucial for us to stay alive. Our bodies need a constant supply of oxygen.

Here on Earth, air provides something just as essential but much less obvious: pressure.

Consider this: a column of air one inch across, stretching from the ground to the top of Earth's atmosphere, weighs about 15 pounds. That's about the same weight as a small dog, or a watermelon. We don't feel it, but that weight is constantly pressing against our bodies and within our lungs. Without it, we'd be dead.

NASA astronaut Mike Massimino has survived the deadly vacuum of space. We got him to tell us how and what we need to do before humans can safely walk on Mars.

MIKE MASSIMINO: Astronauts like me might not like to admit it, but space is a dangerous place. I've walked in space four times. That's me doing repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope. Every minute I'm out there, I know the only thing between me and oblivion is my spacesuit.

The first step, getting dressed for space, is to put on some undergarments. So now I have on my T.C.U., or thermal comfort undergarment, which is the slang for long underwear. And underneath that is my M.A.G., or the maximum absorbency garment, which is slang for diaper. And that answers the question of "how do you go to the restroom if you're locked inside of the spacesuit?"

At roughly 10,000,000 dollars, today's spacesuit is one of the most expensive garments in the entire solar system. And a lot of that expense goes into creating something you wouldn't expect: air pressure.

SABRINA GILMORE (NASA Spacesuit Instructor): Because the astronauts have to take their own pressure when they're doing their spacewalk, you can think of the spacesuit as, like, a big bag of air.

MIKE MASSIMINO: So why is air pressure so important? What would happen to our bodies without it?

SMITH JOHNSTON: If somebody gets sucked out of the space station without a spacesuit, what would happen? Well, that would be a very bad day.

You would not explode; you would just slowly expand. And you'd get to a certain spot, and then, essentially, turn to a goo, a mush, and then sort of vaporize. You would be dead very quickly.

DAVA NEWMAN: Basically, the gas in your lungs and even the solution in your bloodstream would boil.

MIKE MASSIMINO: The cells in your body are filled with dissolved gases, like oxygen and nitrogen. Without air pressure pushing hard against these cells, all that gas is going to bubble out of solution, just like it does when you open a bottle of soda.

DAVA NEWMAN: We cannot survive, just the human body, in the vacuum of space. We have to have protection from a spacesuit.

MIKE MASSIMINO: But how much air pressure does the spacesuit need to keep us alive?

Down here on Earth, the one atmosphere of air pressure at sea level feels very comfortable. As you rise up in altitude, there are fewer air molecules around you, producing less pressure. At 30,000 feet, the height of Mt. Everest, the pressure drops to only one-third of an atmosphere. Luckily, as long as there's plenty of oxygen, humans can survive okay in one-third atmosphere, and that's the amount of pressure they put into the spacesuit.

The whole spacesuit is pumped full of air, like a balloon. But even that causes a major problem. It makes the suit incredibly stiff.

SABRINA GILMORE: You can think of it as like a football. When a football's not inflated, you could bend it a little bit. But, when it's pressurized you would not be able to bend it. And the spacesuit's not that different.

MIKE MASSIMINO: And all that stiffness makes the suit extremely hard to move around in.

In space, I use up a lot of my energy just fighting the suit. The stiffness is particularly noticeable in the gloves. The pressure that keeps me alive makes it really difficult to use my hands.

SABRINA GILMORE: If you took a rubber band and wrapped it around your fingers, and if you just opened and closed maybe 15, 20 times, you'll get a feeling of what makes it so physically demanding.

MIKE MASSIMINO: Astronauts have been on the front lines of the battle between life-saving pressure and mobility since the beginning of space travel.

By the time Neil Armstrong made that giant leap for mankind it was clear: leaping was doable, walking, not so much.

Trust me. I know. These suits aren't made for walking.

If we want to send human explorers to Mars, we're going to need a new kind of spacesuit.

SMITH JOHNSTON: We have to have much more robust suits and capabilities, before we can even think about going to Mars.

MIKE MASSIMINO: Back down on Earth, at my alma mater, M.I.T., a former classmate, Dava Newman, has set up a space-age garment district. She's trying to create a new spacesuit, specifically designed for Mars. Her biggest challenge? Perfecting a whole new way of producing lifesaving pressure.

DAVA NEWMAN: My passion is astronaut performance. Is there a different way, a better way, perhaps, to provide pressure?

MIKE MASSIMINO: And the solution? Dava wants to shrink-wrap astronauts and apply the pressure directly to their skin.

Hollywood has been shrink-wrapping space-traveling actresses for years, but the goal was purely aesthetic. No one knew if you could build enough pressure into a tight suit to keep an astronaut alive, so Dava does a lot of experimenting.

DAVA NEWMAN: Let's roll up your pant leg.

MIKE MASSIMINO: Alright.

DAVA NEWMAN: We're going to show you a prototype of mechanical counter-pressure, meaning where we apply the pressure directly to your skin. We really want you to have maximum mobility, just like you would in your street clothes.

MIKE MASSIMINO: Yeah.

DAVA NEWMAN: So, I'm going to put this suit completely on you, like "shrink-wrap an astronaut."

We need to provide a third of an atmosphere, and we've been working on that for about 10 years. Could we provide enough pressure to keep someone alive?

MIKE MASSIMINO: One way to find out is to wrap body parts in super stretchy material to see if you can apply pressure uniformly, otherwise it could hurt.

I feel like an Italian sausage. That's what I feel like.

Wrapping people like sausages is just the beginning. Dava studies human motion, trying to preserve mobility while maintaining pressure. She even tries out her spacesuit ideas on a robot.

DAVA NEWMAN: I'm collecting a lot of data out of the robot because it informs our spacesuit design.

MIKE MASSIMINO: But even the tightest girdle-like bodysuit can't provide quite enough pressure to keep a person alive in the vacuum of space.

It just isn't tight enough.

DAVA NEWMAN: If we put the astronauts into a compression stocking, that's great. But it still only gets me two-thirds of the way there.

How can I get the rest?

MIKE MASSIMINO: Looking for inspiration to solve the problem, Dava turns to the animal kingdom. The possibilities are endless: the balletic bat, the slithery snake, or the creature with the highest stature in the animal kingdom: the giraffe?

DAVA NEWMAN: I always wondered, "Why don't giraffes faint?" That's a tall creature. His head's down eating on the grass, puts his head up to reach the tree, five meters. Why doesn't he faint?

MIKE MASSIMINO: So what about the giraffe's physiology keeps its blood from rushing out of his head?

DAVA NEWMAN: I actually think giraffes have, like, an internal g-suit, an instantaneous pressurization.

MIKE MASSIMINO: Special muscles in the giraffe's blood vessels constrict to create pressure. That blocks the blood from escaping out of his head.

DAVA NEWMAN: Maybe we can learn from nature-biomimicry-and, as an engineer, put that into some of our designs.

MIKE MASSIMINO: The constricting vessels in the giraffe's upper neck inspired the idea of building additional pressure into the suit with a tight web of super-strong red fibers.

DAVA NEWMAN: Now, what I'm doing is giving you a bit of structure. Through that structure, I can actually even carry more pressure.

MIKE MASSIMINO: So if you just had the complete suit here, without the lines, you'd be able to move around in it fine, but you wouldn't get the pressure, the protection you need to work in the vacuum of space.

But the red lines need to go in just the right places, so they don't inhibit mobility.

Though we don't have a complete, full-pressure suit yet, we're getting there, and Dava's built a slightly looser mockup. This could be the spacesuit of the future.

I can't wait to see what she looks like.

She calls it the biosuit.

You look like a superhero!

DAVA NEWMAN: I want to be Elastigirl. Yeah, Elastigirl was one of my favorites.

MIKE MASSIMINO: You look like Elastigirl. It's futuristic.

Amazingly, a combination of tight stretchy fabric and a stiff web of fibers looks like it can provide the necessary pressure directly to the skin, but it isn't easy.

What is the hardest part of the body to pressurize in this suit?

DAVA NEWMAN: It's definitely the elbows, the joints, and the concave areas: the back of the knees, armpits. Those areas are really complicated.

MIKE MASSIMINO: I volunteered to test-drive her suit in space. Unfortunately, the mockup isn't mission-ready, and it only comes in ladies sizes.

When are you going to be ready for primetime?

DAVA NEWMAN: We would really need a few more years of research, so that's where we're at in terms of the development of the suit.

MIKE MASSIMINO: A fully functional biosuit will contain smart wires so scientists can monitor your vital signs. The hard backplate will support the oxygen tanks needed for breathing.

Speaking of breathing, that part of the suit would be pretty much the same as today, with a gas-pressurized helmet, but you'll breathe easier.

Dava's found you could run around in the biosuit and consume about 50 percent less oxygen than you would in today's bulky suit.

DAVA NEWMAN: We've proven the technical feasibility. This is possible. We might have this incredibly different way to design spacesuits for the future.

MIKE MASSIMINO: I may be too old to go to the Red Planet, but it's almost certain that the astronauts of tomorrow will have a very different wardrobe than the one I've been wearing. They'll have suits that are made for walking.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Even after just a few days in the fridge, a lot of food can get pretty unappetizing, mostly because mold and bacteria begin to take over your food. So, imagine eating meals that had been sitting around for two to three years!

That's what the astronauts who go to Mars are going to have to do.

I met some chefs trying to cook up delicious dishes that will provide all the comforts of home, even when the dining room is 100 million miles away. In a food lab at the Johnson Space Center, Michele Perchonok heats up pork chops for a taste test.

If you're the type who likes your food fresh, this isn't the meal for you. One of these chops has been sitting on a shelf at room temperature for two years, the other has been lying around for eight. That's right , I said "eight" years.

Can I tell which one? And will my stomach mind this experience less than it did artificial gravity? We shall soon find out.

I think this one is older.

So, in other words, it wasn't obvious to me that one was eight years old and one was two. But I have to...if I were to guess, I would say this one, because the meat was just a little mushier, and I'm thinking maybe it would break down over time.

MICHELE PERCHONOK (NASA Food Scientist): Actually, that one's the two-year-old product, and this one's the eight-year-old product.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So, I was wrong?

MICHELE PERCHONOK: You were wrong.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Michele heads up a team figuring out how to feed astronauts all the way to Mars and back. The food will have to be nutritious, last for years, taste good and, of course, behave itself in zero gravity.

You see, weightless food tends to do the darndest things, which limits the menu.

SUNITA WILLIAMS (NASA Astronaut): Anything that can just float in the air easily is a problem. And it's going to get in people's sleeping bags, it's going to get in science experiments, it's going to get in people's eyes. One of the reasons I cut my hair when I was up there was I was worried about people at the dinner table eating and then a piece of my hair comes by and floats in their mouth.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Astronauts cook by adding cold or hot water to freeze-dried foods, or heating food pouches in an electric warmer. A pair of scissors-in space more useful than a fork or spoon-opens the meals, which, actually, can be pretty good, as I discover courtesy of Vickie Kloeris, Michele's colleague.

What's next?

VICKIE KLOERIS (NASA Food Scientist): Okay, We have one of our thermal-stabilized entrees, fiesta chicken.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thermal-stabilized? Again, it's just preserved?

VICKIE KLOERIS: Preserved, shelf-stable.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Preserved is a little more appetizing than thermal-stabilized. Put simply, it's a way of killing germs with heat.

And I see, uh, Cyrillic characters here? In Russian?

VICKIE KLOERIS: Well, actually in Russian it translates as "party chicken."

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Party chicken!

VICKIE KLOERIS: Which was a little difficult for our Russian colleagues to understand.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And I'll taste this.

Mm, I like that.

MICHELE PERCHONOK: That's a very good product.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Good for Earth orbit, but what about Mars? When it comes to feeding an expedition like that, problems multiply.

Michele and Vickie must plan 7,000 meals and snacks to nourish six people for up to three years. And if food is sent ahead of the astronauts, it will have to keep for five years. Yet only seven of NASA's 65 thermo-stabilized edibles have that kind of shelf-life. The rest end up like this.

So, this looks nasty.

MICHELE PERCHONOK: That is very nasty. So what you are looking at here is our citrus fruit salad, five-year-old versus two-year-old.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So something happened between two and five years. What?

MICHELE PERCHONOK: There's a lot of chemistry going on.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Even if you kill off every microbe in sealed food, it still contains sugars and proteins that react with each other over time. The result is obvious when you compare this youthful and geriatric chicken salad.

So the chicken gets darker and the greenery becomes pale, and it's not just a cosmetic phenomena.

MICHELE PERCHONOK: No.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You are losing nutrients, you're losing...?

MICHELE PERCHONOK: You are losing flavor, nutrients, probably texture, you're losing everything.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: A solution might be new packaging that keeps out all water and air, unlike today's plastics.

MICHELE PERCHONOK: With that packaging, we get a about a 9- to 12-month shelf-life. So there is no way we are going to Mars with this kind of packaging.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Nor can we use foil, fine for low-earth orbit, but too heavy for Mars, when you're launching 22,000 pounds of food at the cost of a million dollars per pound.

There is also something else to consider.

JERRY LINENGER: When you're in space, stuck inside, basically, a can, food becomes, kind of, a highlight of the day.

CLAYTON ANDERSON: You have to eat in order to survive, but what people don't understand, I don't think, is the psychological aspect of food.

ANDREW THOMAS: Because it is one the few pleasures that you have control over. And I think people serving on submarines have long understood the importance of food for crews' well-being.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Since good food makes astronauts happy, I asked Michele and Vickie if there's a popular dish they'd especially like to send to Mars.

VICKIE KLOERIS: Well, I think that would be our shrimp cocktail.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That sounds good.

VICKIE KLOERIS: Our shrimp cocktail is a freeze-dried product. So this has been rehydrated.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It's not only the shrimp, it's the cocktail sauce?

VICKIE KLOERIS: It's the sauce.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If Earth were 50-million miles away, this would be five stars, but on Earth I've had better shrimp cocktail at the local...

VICKIE KLOERIS: I certainly hope so.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It better not have been freeze-dried for what I was paying for it.

Everyone loves soda pop!

It tickles your tummy!

And makes you burp!

But never drink soda pop in zero gravity...

Because everything you eat and drink just floats around in there...

So when you burp, it isn't just air that comes out!

Sorry.

That's why astronauts don't bring soda pop to space.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If you have to cross a great distance with no pit stops, the slower you go, the more supplies you're forced to carry. And if your route takes you through dangerous territory, all the more reason to speed things up.

That's especially true for a roundtrip to Mars, which, with current technology, might take two or three years.

Correspondent Jake Ward caught up with some folks trying to revolutionize space flight. And if their plans work, future spaceships would go so fast, they'd leave our long-distance-traveling woes far behind us.

JAKE WARD (Correspondent): The space between Earth and Mars is filled with stuff that can kill you: meteoroids can smash your spaceship to bits; zero gravity eats away at your bones; and cosmic rays increase your odds of getting cancer. The risks all get worse the longer the trip. Right now, the best rockets would take two and a half years to get us there and back.

MICHAEL FOALE: Two and a half years is what I see as the biggest risk going to Mars.

JAKE WARD: Why so long? The problem is fuel.

The fuel in this shuttle tank weighs almost a million pounds, and that just gets you into near-earth orbit. Mars is still more than 35,000,000 miles away. You can't carry enough fuel to fire engines all the way to Mars. In fact, a chemical rocket would empty its gas tank just escaping Earth's gravity and then would let momentum carry it the rest of the way.

EDGAR BERING (Astrophysicist, University of Houston): Now, the problem with that is that you're coasting the whole way.

JAKE WARD: Which takes a very long time.

EDGAR BERING: The other problem with that is that if anything goes wrong, you're stuck. You have no abort capability in mid-flight.

JAKE WARD: Former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz is well aware of the dangers of such a mission.

FRANKLIN CHANG-DIAZ (Astrophysicist, Ad Astra Rocket Company): At that point, you have no choice but just to continue to go. And, god forbid, you lose propellant or you lose an oxygen tank, and it's not going to be possible to return. And we would watch this crew die, for months, in front of the whole world.

JAKE WARD: To make sure this doesn't happen, engineers are designing new kinds of rockets that could go much faster and more efficiently. They range from water vapor thrusters to going nuclear, but none can get a crew to Mars and back in less than a year.

So, this is it.

FRANKLIN CHANG-DIAZ: This is it.

JAKE WARD: But here, outside Houston, Chang-Diaz and his team are building a potentially game changing rocket called the VASIMR.

FRANKLIN CHANG-DIAZ: The ultimate goal is to have a small sun in the engine.

JAKE WARD: A sun in the engine? Well, kind of. The VASIMR uses radio waves to heat argon gas to a million degrees, so hot it becomes a plasma. The sun is made of plasma. In a plasma, atoms break down into a soup of charged particles that move very, very fast. And if you fire these very hot, very fast particles out the back of a spaceship, you've got a rocket that can really move.

But putting this sun in the engine creates some new problems.

Think of this candle as a conventional rocket. It's plenty hot, but VASIMR, it's really a whole other ball of wax.

Test firings have already topped a million degrees, thousands of times hotter than a chemical engine.

So the challenge for VASIMR is: how do you keep an engine this hot from destroying everything around it?

LAWRENCE DEAN (Ad Astra Rocket Company) This is 3/16 stainless, and it was in the way of the plume coming out.

JAKE WARD: Wow!

LAWRENCE DEAN : It did a pretty good job on it.

JAKE WARD: I don't know much, but this is broken. I know that much. Holy cow.

Fortunately, there may be a solution: magnets. If you can encircle the million-degree plasma with a strong magnetic field, it will form a heat shield and stop the plasma from destroying its surroundings.

With this shield in place, Franklin thinks the VASIMR can go 35 miles per second, through space. That's fast enough to get from New York to Los Angeles in roughly a minute and a half.

That means you could cut down the roundtrip to Mars from two and a half years in a chemical rocket, to just five months. And by getting about 5,000 miles to the gallon, you'd be lugging around a much smaller gas tank.

In 2014, they plan to test the VASIMR engine in space, for the first time, when they attach it to the International Space Station. After that, they hope to get it ready for deep space travel. And if it's successful...

FRANKLIN CHANG-DIAZ: It completely opens up not just a mission to Mars, but it opens up, potentially, the entire solar system to human exploration.

Don't like the high cost of rocket fuel?

Tired of racing around in space?

Wouldn't it just be great to slow down and enjoy the ride?

Yes. One day we might just be sailing through space!

Light from the sun actually pushes against reflective surfaces.

And if they are large enough, they can propel a vessel through space.

And scientists have already launched some successful tests.

So how long would it take to get to Mars?

A little over two years!

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It might take a while before we have the technology to get a human safely to Mars, but, in the meantime, we're already exploring the Red Planet.

So, what's it like on Mars?

ROBOT: What's it like? It's freezing, that's what. And the dust!

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Alright, move five meters to the right, and pick up that rock.

ROBOT: That's easy for you to say. You know what dust can do to your servos?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, come on. Give it a try!

ROBOT: Give it a try? I don't believe this guy.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, so today's Martian robot explorers don't have this much attitude. But in this episode's profile, we meet a designer who thinks maybe they should.

Vandi Verma is a natural born trailblazer.

VANDI VERMA (Mars Rover Driver): I really love adventure and exploration.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: She constantly looks for new discoveries to make and obstacles to overcome, from climbing mountains to flying planes to her job as a rover driver at NASA.

VANDI VERMA: I've always loved exploring the environment I was in, and the rovers allow me to explore another planet.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Humans may be decades away from visiting Mars, but Vandi gets a first-hand look at the Red Planet every day she goes to work.

PAUL TOMPKINS (Space Robotics Engineer/Vandi Verma's Husband): Through being at that console, she gets direct virtual presence on the surface of Mars in a way very few other people in the world do.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: She is one of the people responsible for making sure the rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, make it through each drive safely.

NASA originally scheduled the mission to last just 90 days, but that was back in 2004, and the vigilance of drivers like Vandi has kept the rovers alive and exploring much longer.

Vandi began dreaming of this interplanetary adventure back in 1997, when NASA sent another rover, Sojourner, to Mars.

VANDI VERMA: So, when the very first Mars rover landed, I remember reading about it, and I was just amazed because it was such an amazing thing to do, to accomplish, to get a rover on another planet. And I was like, "Someday, I want to work on that."

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Her passion for out-of-this-world exploration traces back to her childhood in India.

VANDI VERMA: I first became interested when somebody gave me this little book about space. And it was the first time I realized just how vast the universe was, and just how different the various planets, even in our own solar system was. And I wanted to see them. It seemed like a very remote possibility, but I never gave up hope for it.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: The odds were stacked against her. Growing up in a traditional Indian family, Vandi was expected to follow her mother's wishes, to settle down and enter an arranged marriage with a nice Indian husband.

VANDI VERMA: My parents have an arranged marriage. My sister has an arranged marriage. For whatever reason, it wasn't something that I was ready for.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Vandi dreamed of following a different path, inspired by her father, an air force pilot. Unlike her cautious mother, her dad encouraged her to take risks and seek adventure.

After high school, she took her first big step. She moved to the United States and studied engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. But that didn't stop Vandi's mother from trying to arrange a marriage for her.

VANDI VERMA: She would find people in Pittsburgh, when I lived there. I was amazed. And they would call me.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Vandi dodged her mom's suitors long enough to meet classmate, and fellow roboticist, Paul Tompkins.

PAUL TOMPKINS: Like Vandi, I've been in love with space for as long as I can remember.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: In 2005, they decided to spend their lives together.

VANDI VERMA: We both love adventure.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: They share a love for taking risks but not chances.

VANDI VERMA: It's very natural for me to take risk. At the same time, it's calculated risk.

PAUL TOMPKINS: So, she has the element of adventure on one side, but then she's smart about it, because she's not going to take a foolhardy risk.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: She realized that this calculated risk mindset would also help navigate her new field.

VANDI VERMA: I discovered robotics when I was at Carnegie Mellon, and, instantly, I knew this was what I wanted to do. Robots are incredible for exploring space or any areas where it's hard to send humans, because we don't have to worry about survival, you know, food and water.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: While getting her Ph.D., Vandi headed to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to hone her robot-driving skills in its Mars-like terrain.

VANDI VERMA: Atacama is a place where they measure rainfall in millimeters per decade. And that was a perfect place for us to take our robot and do an astrobiology experiment, to look for life.

My research focused on making sure that the robots could handle unanticipated situations.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: This work caught the attention of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab who offered her the chance to explore the surface of another planet, from a distance.

PAUL TOMPKINS: Really, the center of the world, when it comes to robotics, is at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So she headed to Pasadena, California, to join the Mars rover team and brought her motorcycle with her.

VANDI VERMA: Mostly, I use it as a commuting bike, to get from home to work, but I'd always take the longest path possible and the most swervy.

PAUL TOMPKINS: Her means of transport was another way to get a little adventure out of life.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: As a rover driver, she pushes Spirit and Opportunity to get as much data as possible without breaking them.

VANDI VERMA: Safety's the biggest concern, but you can't be so risk-averse that you don't go anywhere.

We don't use a remote control to drive them, so we're not driving them in real time. We get, we get the conditions under which the robot is in today, use those, and plan a drive, and then we send it to the rover and the rover executes it on its own. And then, once it's complete, it sends us back the information.

JOHN CALLAS (Mars Rover Project Manager) We've personified these two vehicles. They're like our children. They have human characteristics: they're intrepid, they're accomplished, they're dutiful. And then they're so darn cute!

VANDI VERMA: There is no G.P.S. on Mars. You can't just say, "Hey," you know, "this is this location. Drive to that location." So, just moving the rovers, there's a certain amount of risk.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And there's little room for error when driving on another planet.

JOHN CALLAS: Mars is a very dangerous place. It has very little atmosphere, the temperatures are incredibly cold, there are huge changes in temperature every day. So these rovers have to endure that kind of environment. They are solar-powered. So if the rovers get too cold, or if they get starved for energy-which is just the same way a human being is starving-they could die.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Since some of the most interesting places are the hardest to get to, the rovers constantly face the danger of getting stuck. And the drivers brainstorm different ways to get them out and then try out these techniques in a replica of the surface of Mars, called the "sandbox."

VANDI VERMA: There isn't one obvious right way to think. You want to explore the options. So, the sandbox is a great way to do that, because you have one chance on Mars, but in the sandbox you can reset and say, "Well that didn't work, let's try a different strategy."

You may choose to drive forward, you may choose to try to do it with a slight turn, an uphill turn, or drive backwards, maybe wiggle the wheels, in order to loosen the terrain up. Once we figure out what solution works best, then we do it on Mars, with that one chance we have on Mars.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: The J.P.L. team has avoided an end of mission since 2004. That's more than 25 times longer than the original plan. And this run has been key to the rover program's revolutionizing our knowledge of Mars.

VANDI VERMA: The rovers have detected signs of past water. We've detected minerals that show that there was water.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And since water is the elixir of life as we know it, these findings suggest fantastic possibilities.

JOHN CALLAS: What the rovers have found is that Mars, at one time, was much more like the earth than it is today. And this is very exciting and very intriguing, because if it was like the earth at a time when life started on the earth, did life start on Mars, or is there life there today?

VANDI VERMA: Whenever you see some sort of a discovery made by the rovers, you sort of feel like you helped them along. It is a little bit parental feeling that, hey, you know, I'm proud of that rover.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And like the rovers she drives, Vandi continues to create her own path and make new discoveries.

VANDI VERMA: When I was growing up, I always thought it would be really cool to work in space. And it just seemed so impossible, because everything that was going on at that time was halfway across the world. And now, when I do look back upon it, it is very amazing to think that wow, I am very fortunate to be able to live what I dreamt about.

How fast is the rover?

Pitted against a snail and a tortoise...

...let's see how fast they can run the 100 meter.

10 minutes later...

20 minutes later...

Yes, the tortoise won the 100m!

How did everyone do?

The snail: 2 hours, 4 minutes

The rover: 33 minutes, 20 seconds

The tortoise: 21 minutes, 56 seconds!

A new world champion!

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And now for some final thoughts on space travel.

In the early days of the great ocean voyages, the explorers and shipmates were brave...or crazy. During their yearlong voyages, they risked, and often succumbed to, scurvy, dehydration, starvation, disease, pestilence, hostile natives and, of course, shipwreck.

These were the known challenges. Add some mysterious unknowns like: "Is Earth's edge just over the horizon?" Or "Do demons lurk there?" and you've got a voyage that few, if any of us, would ever take. Yet some humans embrace these risks, and our species owes them boundless gratitude.

With space as the next long-voyage frontier, another laundry-list of life threatening challenges await us: food spoilage, wayward space debris, loss of health in zero-G, psychological effects of isolation, and, once again, shipwreck.

Now, consider that, in 1950, the risk of asteroid fragments colliding with your spaceship was not only unknown, it was undreamt of. Same holds for the damage that solar flares pose to the D.N.A. of spacefarers.

Today, these are known unknowns: we know they're out there, and even though we won't always know when they'll strike, we can, in principle, protect against them.

But what's scarier than known unknowns are unknown unknowns: stuff we haven't thought of yet but would put an astronaut's health or life at risk, such as....

Ha! We haven't thought of it yet. That's why we call them unknown unknowns. And that's why, to explorers-today we call them astronauts)-the frontier will forever be "the home of the brave."

And that's the Cosmic Perspective.

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PBS Airdate: January 19, 2011 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON (Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History)>: Hi, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host of NOVA scienceNOW, where this season we're asking six big questions. On this episode, Can We Make It to Mars? We would love to take a walk on the Red Planet, but can we get there alive?

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What Is Biomimicry? – Biomimicry Institute

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What Is Biomimicry? – Biomimicry Institute

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For all the challenges we face, nature has a solution.

Biomimicry offers an empathetic, interconnected understanding of how life works and ultimately where we fit in. It is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies used by species alive today. After billions years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what remains hold the secret to our survival. The goal is to create products, processes, and systems-new ways of living-that solve our greatest design challenges sustainably and in solidarity with all life on earth. We can use biomimicry to not only learn from nature's wisdom, but also heal ourselves-and this planet-in the process.

Biomimicry provides the blueprints that can be adapted across context, industries, and be scalable to address the needs. See examples of biomimicry in action.

The 3 Essential Elements of Biomimicry

When translating nature's strategies into design, the science of the practice involves three essential elements: Emulate, Ethos, and (Re)Connect. These three components are infused in every aspect of biomimicry and represent these core values at its essence.
Emulate
The scientific, research-based practice of learning from and then replicating nature's forms, processes, and ecosystems to create more regenerative designs.
Ethos
The philosophy of understanding how life works and creating designs that continuously support and create conditions conducive to life.
(Re)Connect
The concept that we are nature and find value in connecting to our place on Earth as part of life's interconnected systems. (Re)Connect as a practice encourages us to observe and spend time in nature to understand how life works so that we may have a better ethos to emulate biological strategies in our designs.

Why learn from nature?

We have the innate potential to create a world that is harmonious, regenerative, and supports the well-being of all Life. As a young species, we are fortunate enough to have guidance to help us rise to this challenge. Our planet-mates, the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes, have done billions of years of research and development. By infusing biological strategies in design, we can transform sustainable innovation.

Biomimicry brings relief.

We're stressed. Our planet is stressed. Many are losing hope for solving the climate crisis and its many negative effects on ecosystems across the world. Biomimicry gives us hope, because we know the solutions are here, accessible, and validated by the many species contributing to their ecosystems today. By using nature as our mentor, we experience the powerful healing effects it has by connecting to the natural world-while also finding empowering relief to solve these challenges together.

Biomimicry gets us to sustainable solutions, faster.

Our R&D cycles are slow, and climate change won't wait-we must look to the biological blueprints that have been successful over millennia to launch groundbreaking ideas, faster. We don't need to reinvent the strategies that are already here. We just need to learn how to adapt them. We believe the next generation wants to help solve these problems-they don't just want to protest. We can equip learners of all ages to see science as a vehicle for addressing access and equity, building literacy and mathematical skills, and for sense-making about their place in the world.

Biomimicry is generous.

Circularity, sustainability, regenerative design-it means that the things we humans make become a force for restoring air, water, and soil instead of degrading it. Nature uses structure to perform functions and passive forms of energy, whereas our inventions have typically used brute force, like mining ancient carbon and harmful chemicals. We can create conditions conducive to life, just like nature does. Everything we do must model how nature offers reciprocity and abundance for a diversity of life to flourish.

Biomimicry changes the lens in which we view the world.

Innovators turn to biomimicry with the hope of achieving a unique product that is efficient and effective, but they often gain a deep appreciation of and connection to the natural world. Biomimicry encourages conservation for ecosystems and its inhabitants, because they hold the knowledge we need to survive and thrive. When we view the world as deeply interconnected, we gain empathy and better knowledge on how to make decisions that invites a global collaboration that supports the future of all species.

Biomimicry is one type of bioinspired design, but not all bioinspired design is biomimicry.

"Bioinspired design" is a term that is generally accepted as an umbrella category for design and engineering approaches, including biomimicry, that use biology as a resource for solutions. While biomimicry is a type of bioinspired design, not all bioinspired design is biomimicry. An important factor that differentiates biomimicry from other bio-inspired design approaches is the emphasis on learning from and emulating the regenerative solutions living systems have for specific functional challenges.

Within the family of bioinspired design, a common misunderstanding that we encounter is mistaking biomorphism for biomimicry. Biomorphism refers to designs that visually resemble elements from life (they "look like" nature), whereas biomimetic designs focus on function (they "work like" nature). Biomorphic designs can be very beautiful and beneficial, in part because humans have a natural affinity for nature and natural forms. But it's important to realize that "looking like" nature is not a reliable indicator of biomimetic design because a biomimetic design might or might not look anything like the organisms that inspired it. Rather, the important indicator is function.

A similar point of confusion occurs between bioutilization and biomimicry. Bioutilization refers to the use of biological material or living organisms in a design or technology. For example, using trees as a material (wood) for furniture or a living wall of plants to help clean the air in an office building is bioutilization. Bioutilization can be beneficial-organisms can do a lot of things we can't-and biomimetic designs sometimes incorporate bioutilization for this reason. However, just because a designer consults a living organism for a solution to a problem or uses a natural material, it does not mean the design is biomimetic. The distinctive feature of biomimicry is the study and emulation of functional strategies to create sustainable solutions that also embody the (re)connect and ethos elements.

Read more about differentiating biomimicry from other similar disciplines here:

Discover nature's solutions and genius through books, articles, videos, lesson plans, groups, training programs, and more, and the ideas they've inspired with this powerful, free online tool.

This free resource introduces a set of biomimicry tools and core concepts that can help problem-solvers from any discipline begin to incorporate insights from nature into their solutions.

Explore solutions inspired by nature, including water, energy, agricultural, public health, and carbon capture solutions, developed by current and past program participants.

What might you learn after 30 days of observing and learning from the natural world? Explore some of our favorite biomimicry activities that can be done virtually or outside in nature.

Nature Inspired Solutions to Minimize Food Waste.

Enabling Precision Recovery of Resources from Nature.

Redesigning Textiles for a Circular Economy.

Allowing Nature to Lead Innovation, Revolutionize Construction, and Create Sustainably-Built Environments.

We will use the information to be in touch with you via email. You can change your mind at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in the footer of any message you receive from us. Learn more about our privacy practices here.

Support the Next Generation
of Nature-Inspired Innovators

Imagine a world where everything we make is inspired by the natural world. By supporting the Biomimicry Institute you:

Help bring biomimicry education to more students and educators

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Increase the number of biological strategies and resources on AskNature.org and across our entire organization.

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What Is Biomimicry? - Biomimicry Institute

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Biomimicry is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges-and find hope.

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation | The Kid Should See This

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation | The Kid Should See This

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation:

...we human beings, who have been trying to make things for only the blink of an evolutionary eye, have a lot to learn from the long processes of natural selection, whether it's how to make a wing more aerodynamic or a city more resilient or an electronic display more vibrant... one of the most often-cited examples is Velcro, which the Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral patented in 1955 after studying how burs stuck to his clothes...

And the butterflies?

More than a decade ago, an MIT grad named Mark Miles was dabbling in the field of micro-electromechanical and materials processing. As he paged through a science magazine, he was stopped by an article on how butterflies generate color in their wings. The brilliant iridescent blue of the various Morpho species, for example, comes not from pigment, but from "structural color." Those wings harbor a nanoscale assemblage of shingled plates, whose shape and distance from one another are arranged in a precise pattern that disrupts reflective light wavelengths to produce the brilliant blue. To create that same blue out of pigment would require much more energy-energy better used for flying, feeding and reproducing.

Miles wondered if this capability could be exploited in some way. Where else might you want incredibly vivid color in a thin package?

From Smithsonian Mag.

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation | The Kid Should See This

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Smart videos for curious minds of all ages: Science, art, nature, animals, space, technology, DIY, food, music, animation, and more! The Kid Should See This is a free video resource for parents, teachers, and kids of all ages. Watch a huge collection of high-quality, kid-friendly, age appropriate, educational videos together at home, during homeschool, or in the classroom.

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Innovators often borrow ideas from nature, an approach called biomimicry. The cockleburr plant led to the invention of Velcro. The feet of Geckos inspired the creation of adhesives. Scientists were influenced by the eyes of lobsters and elephantnose fish to develop a night vision lens.

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How a kingfisher, an owl, & a penguin helped redesign Japan’s Shinkansen | The Kid Should See This

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How a kingfisher, an owl, & a penguin helped redesign Japan’s Shinkansen | The Kid Should See This

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How is Japan's Shinkansen, a long-nosed bullet train that travels up to 240-320 km/h (150-200 mph), like a kingfisher? Or an owl? Or an Adélie penguin? In this video from Vox and 99% Invisible, we see how these three birds influenced the 1989 redesign of this high speed train with the help of birdwatching and biomimicry.

Earlier models were rounder and louder, often suffering from the phenomenon of "tunnel boom," where deafening compressed air would rush out of a tunnel after a train rushed in. But a moment of inspiration from engineer and birdwatcher Eiji Nakatsu led the system to be redesigned based on the aerodynamics of three species of birds.

Nakatsu's case is a fascinating example of biomimicry, the design movement pioneered by biologist and writer Janine Benyus. It's the idea that big challenges in design, engineering, and sustainability have often been solved before through 3.8 billion years of evolution on earth. We just have to go out and find them.

The video is chock full of excellent ways that we can learn from prairie dog burrows, shark skin, lotus leaves, ecosystems, and more. Related reading: Circular economies.

We love biomimicry and the solutions that it can yield. Watch these videos next: Think Like a Tree - Problem solving with nature's best ideas, mimicking shark skin to combat superbugs, How Ingenious Animals Have Engineered Air Conditioning, and can Namib Desert beetles help us solve our drought problems?

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How a kingfisher, an owl, & a penguin helped redesign Japan's Shinkansen

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How is Japan's Shinkansen, a long-nosed bullet train that travels up to 240-320 km/h (150-200 mph), like a kingfisher? Or an owl? Or an Adélie penguin?