Shen appointed assistant professor of civil & environmental engineering at Clarkson northcountrynow.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from northcountrynow.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Buildings, bridges and offshore infrastructure might one day stand on pilings modeled on snakeskin, based on research at the University of California, Davis, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. With surfaces designed to move through soil more easily in one direction than the other, snakeskin pilings would be easier to drive into soil but difficult to pull out.
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Despite human inventiveness and ingenuity, we still lag far behind the elegant and efficient solutions forged by nature over millions of years of evolution.
This also applies for buildings, where animals and plants, have developed extremely effective digging methods, for example, that are far more energy-efficient than modern tunnelling machines, and even self-repairing foundations that are unusually resistant to erosion and earthquakes (yep, we re talking about roots here).
Researchers from all over the world are therefore seeking inspiration in nature to develop the buildings of the future, and researchers from Aarhus University and University of California Davis have now in collaboration published an article in the scientific journal