Grand Designs

Amazement at the complexity of design in nature, indicating a Designer: designs that help and inspire human designers of machine improvements etc.

Bacteria-popping surfaces!

re Cicada wings On the surface of the wings an hexagonal array of blunted spikes, nanoscopic pillars – don’t look potential killers; … a safe, non-chemical disinfectant!

Biochemistry

— The extreme intricacy of the structure of living tissue!

Biomimetics

The yellow desert scorpion survives when sand whirls, whips; electo-microscopy has shown fine detail that equips and halves the rate of sand-erosion (checked out by computer simulation)

Biomimetics 2: “Shrilk”

A ‘plastic’ called shrilk, made from shrimps and silk: clever designers discovering Creator’s designs, mimicking. The cuticle of arthropods is an exoskeleton

Brr!! Woof!! and Penguins

Brr!! Woof!! Why don’t the little doggies’ paws freeze when its icy out of doors? their pads have freeze-resistant fat but also, and on top of that

Such Surprising Things (IP)

It is a suprising thing that birds can sing so well. It is a surprising fact to tell that they have tracked their way around our sphere – their brains do not appear sufficient size

of crickets and grasshoppers …

Hear the little cricket ‘sing’, using teeth upon its wing (raised to help acoustically), ‘heard’ by membrane on its knee. Grasshoppers upon a farm –

The Elephant’s Trunk

40,000 muscles in a powerful limb that can branches rip, pick a single pin, with its mobile tip, yet can dig for moisture, without skin’s rupture. It’s a long sucking nose

Woodpecker’s shock-absorbers

Hammering rapidly: force on its head that is greater than 1000 g*. (If banged at just 300g, we’d be concussed, or our brains would be messed.) Specialised structure of bones and tendons,

Leafy lifecycle

When comes the end of winter’s cold, squeezed-up tiny leaves unfold, … The cooling of late summer air activity triggers to prepare … When comes the end of winter’s cold …

The Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder (IP)

… if such a fading face should smile, just like a Cheshire Cat a disembodied mouth profile we’d see – who’d fancy that?! …

No more ‘junk DNA’

The ‘brain’ of each cell has DNA-genes, chemical coding builds, guides its ‘machines’. “Ninety-eight percent useless junk”, they thought , “– evolution’s left-overs
Cherry

The Plant Hopper’s Gears

The plant hopper hops from leaf to leaf, two legs together, or they’d come to grief, with a lop-sided jump they’d just have a bump, so the legs move...

What those Galapagos finches don’t teach

Darwin observing natural selection of finches with different beaks, thought this a picture of life’s evolution, but there never was any brand new information …
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A is for Aardvark –

with a nose like a pig (though longer); it’s stronger, and able to dig; its burrow is made at speeds that exceed six men who are digging at speed...

No Crash-Landings!

How does the busy little bee land neatly on the breeze-blown tree? The engineer scratched his head, ‘Why do our robots crash instead – we’ve done...

Amazing Archer!

Hawkeye of the world of fishes, powerful arrow rarely misses: looking out from under water somehow knows just where it oughter …

What am I?

I have a special bubble in my bladder …

Brains

Thoughts struggle, buzz, boggle – intensive scientific gaze can’t grasp or fully know, the detail of activity in minute, infinitesimal maze, as...

Weeds …

… may be destructive to perfect swards, but focus your view and see how attractive the shape and the hue, the markings and texture, the details of...

Biomimetics (3) ‘Gecko-type’ tape

They imitate those gecko feet with their microscopic hairs* – the tape’s stick’s strong, but they can’t repeat attachment and detachment long …

Sleep Refreshment

but when we are asleep … removing bad things, internally flushing, refreshing and clearing the mind …

How many molecular switches in your brain?

How many stars in the Milky Way? How many nerve links in part of my brain? How many switches, – well, now they can say more than the number of computers and routers,

The tiniest motor

In all the trillions of your cells there are motors nano-size … they spin around, so squeezing … co-ordinated circles of chemical activity
Cherry

The Mimic Octopus*

This octopus can mimic as its body morphs like plastic: it can flatten out, and trail its arms, and swim like a banded sole; it can make itself look...

That Myth!

There once was a myth that all fauna were derived from a kind of amoeba …
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Amazing ‘eyes’ that hypnotize

‘Eyes’ that mesmerize – apparent stillness in the midst of rattling tail of stunning iridescence …

The Golden Ratio

Mathematical analysis of aesthetically pleasing shapes … golden ratio … beauty – why?
Cherry

???? …

How does a caterpillar change and all its innards rearrange into a dainty butterfly? …

Mystery in the Chrysalis

How does the caterpillar change, and all its innards rearrange? Emerging from its egg with lumps, inactive miniscule disc-bumps to one day form leg-...
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Cherry

Enablers for the special 10

…for sensitive surgery and superb creativity of music and art.

Where did all our water come from?

… Their guess for this cooling sphere so hot doesn’t have a solution to how we have got these oceans so vast of this simplest solvent, their only suggestion that somehow it came by meteor or comet again and again impacts in their thousands battering the sphere … no ‘bang’ came from nowhere to make us appear …

How does the little beetle spring?

More than 200g g-force experienced at take-off (– extremely extreme); and each time it can jump over 200 times its body length, (like a man jumping...

The Evolutionary-creation Myths

There once was a myth that mutations … There once was a myth of long ages … There once was a myth that ‘pooh-poohed’ … There once was a myth of a gradual emergence, from nothing, of animal and plant life evolving …

The Shrimp's Eye

Biomimetics 4) Deep in the bottom of the ocean (light level low) …they hadn’t thought of the ‘genius’ of the shrimp solution …

The Impossible Move

They seem to think life started in the sea – somehow, but plants appeared on land, and then – unplanned some moving creatures in the water thought...

How did it arise?

Exquisite the painting, admired, bestowed delight for the viewers and compliments flowed … but not to the artist whom none of them knew, though...

The lesser light

What a wonderful moon we have: silvery glow – we watch it grow and shrink, rise and glide, and slowly sink calm for lovers and travellers’ guide in...
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Gadgets amazing!

Fingers sense touch detail, caress; delicately manipulate surgeon’s scalpel, artists’ brush, musical melodies fast and intricate. Nerve networks back and fore from … handle and use with care!
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Cherry

Diamonds of truth

I remember a child (about 8 years old) in Sunday School saying something like ‘It’s a good idea to say you believe in God – if it’s wrong you won’t...
Cherry

The Age of Discovery

From new-born breath ’til still of death: Hearing sounds and conversation, gazing round in exploration … mouth contortions … life-long, look and think …
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The Amazing Molecule!

Surprising simple structure bafflingly suitable properties unusual medium essential for living cells for transportations and chemical reactions … and lighter when frozen … don’t stand on that ice until you know it’s thick enough, tough enough! But how is there so much on earth? …

Don’t say ‘cheese’!

Is it made from green cheese, that friendly moon up there? or did it from a young earth squeeze, or join us from elsewhere? The moon probes told us ‘...
Cherry

Pacific Golden Plover

Golden Plover flies across the ocean – cannot swim, and so in constant motion, eighty-eight hours with no land to rest; somehow knows just how much...
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Cherry

Moving to new areas!

Dandelion’s parachute lifts the seed to travel far; sticky goosegrass*, hooked barbs of burs cling to clothes and hairy furs; berries – food-wrapped...
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Squirting ‘cucumber’ …

Ecballium elaterium even makes David Attenborough laugh out loud!
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2 Super-sensory-sensitive scrubbing towers

One nose two tunnels through which the air flows as it goes …You value your mouth, ears, eyes, but do you despise your humble nose?
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Cherry

That long nose!

Starfish Girl suggested that as I had written on Nose, and she on Trunk, I should try one on the famous nose. This is a revision of an old one …
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Gold cherry

On the 6500+ km journey, twice

I’m a tiny round egg in the Sargasso sea, and hatch to be leaf-like, on currents I float eastward to a continent very remote, many get eaten, but for...

They aren’t missing!

They used to think that soon they‘d find a ‘missing link’ between mankind and apes; they drew imaginative posture and facial shapes – all from discovered tooth – excitement big, – then found to be the tooth of a pig! Then …
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Cherry

How does the spider catch its fly?

Little fly that flits around bumps into a web and bound by the glue, with silk wound round when by hungry spider found; but your mind it would...

What's going on inside?

A fruit fly’s larva has a brain very small but is it simple? …
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Precision-Controlled Complex Chemistry

Atomic design ‘solar-system-like’ … atoms share some of their orbiting electrons (to bind together in combination) … and the staggeringly precise complicated-mega molecules found in living creatures …3D folding configurations interlocking … just when and where needed …