Adapt ─ How Humans Are Tapping into Nature's Secrets to Design and Build a Better Future

Amina Khan believes that nature does it best. In Adapt, she presents fascinating examples of how nature effortlessly solves the problems that humans attempt to solve with decades worth of the latest and greatest technologies, time, and money. Humans are animals too, and animals are incredibly good at doing more with less.

If a fly’s eye can see without hundreds of fancy lenses, and termite mounds can stay cool in the desert without air conditioning, it stands to reason that nature can teach us a thing or two about sustainable technology and innovation. In Khan’s accessible voice, these complex concepts are made simple. There is so much we humans can learn from nature’s billions of years of productive and efficient evolutionary experience. This field is growing rapidly and everyone from architects to biologists to nano-technicians to engineers are paying attention. Results from the simplest tasks, creating velcro to mimic the sticking power of a burr, to the more complex like maximizing wind power by arranging farms to imitate schools of fish can make a difference and inspire future technological breakthroughs.

Adapt shares the weird and wonderful ways that nature has been working smarter and not harder, and how we can too to make billion dollar cross-industrial advances in the very near future.

AMINA KHAN is a science writer at the Los Angeles Times. She’s covered the Curiosity’s landing on Mars and explored abandoned gold mines in pursuit of a dark matter detector. She’s appeared on national television representing The Times on issues of health and science. She’s an alum of the Kavli nanotechnology workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the HiPACC computational astrophysics bootcamp at UC Santa Cruz.