A New Chapter Is Unfolding

For over a decade, designers, researchers, artists, educators, students, and countless others have come to Ask Nature for information and inspiration.
Now, we’re spreading our wings, and Ask Nature is coming to you.

Each month, this newsletter will bring you a selection of compelling updates to this ever-growing library of biological strategies and innovations. Some may be deeper looks at well-known adaptations, others may reveal humanity’s latest discoveries, and still others may reveal long-held but little-known knowledge of nature from human cultures around the world.

Throughout it all, our new approach to design, imagery, reporting, and storytelling will bring you closer than ever before to the living things that can guide us to a more innovative and sustainable future.

First up: Earwigs and their wings. Learn about how a complex series of joints enables them to spring from folded to flight without the use of muscles. The potential: delicate, lightweight materials with incredible strength and flexibility.

LEARN FROM WONDERFUL WINGS

January Highlights

How Sea Creatures Sense Electricity: A gel inside special pores connects external electrical fields to internal nerve cells, giving sharks their spectacular sixth sense. A better understanding of how it all works could yield a whole new way of visualizing our surroundings.

Kombucha: A Microbial Metropolis: Bacteria and yeast feed and protect each other in this bubbly, fermented tea. The bacteria produce cellulose fibers that form a biofilm on the surface, acting as a shield and nutritional storehouse for the community. That film may lead to new biocompatible wound dressings, water-filters, and textiles.

How Moths Outwit Bats With Their Super Hearing: The tympanal organs of moths can "hear" bat biosonar and trigger behavioral responses. This kind of frequency-targeted, distributed sound detection could be useful for medical devices, such as hearing aids, or even wildlife monitoring.

How Tunsian Desert Ants Smell in Stereo: The antennae of the Tunisian desert ant create a detailed olfactory map by detecting smells in left and right channels. Olfactory detection could be useful in homing devices, such as those in self-driving vehicles or vehicles that are operated remotely.

Attention Beetles: Don’t Follow Your Nose: Orchidantha inouei attracts dung beetles as pollinators, not by perfectly mimicking the smell of dung, but by being just close enough to attract the beetles (and not dung flies). How might we use species-specific tastes to fine-tune attractants or repellents for agriculture, pest control, or other applications?

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