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" IT&amp;#039;S 2010 AND YOU&amp;#039;RE OUT on your afternoon errands. You look down to check your PDA, which is backlit naturally by celestial blue iridescence, like the wings of a butterfly. Then you glance up at the bank you&amp;#039;re heading into, and its walls are gleamingly clean. They&amp;#039;re painted with a material that mimics the leaf of a lotus plant, whose thousands of microscopic ridges help rainwater wash away the dirt it collects. Your jacket at home is made of a similar fabric. Once inside the bank, you notice that the temperature feels cool, even though this is the dead of summer and the building has no air-conditioning. The secret: tunnels dug beneath, imitating the cooling genius of a termite mound. This isn&amp;#039;t a world that science writer and biologist Janine Benyus is dreaming of. It&amp;#039;s one she is creating. Her 1997 book, Biomimicry, chronicled how nature could be used as a model to create products like the ones described above, all of which exist in prototype. &amp;quot;The key thing I noticed about habitats, and critters that are in them,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;was how elegantly, exquisitely, they adapted to their places. How they&amp;#039;ve not only adapted to their places but actually create and enhance their places.&amp;quot; She realized that if inventors and scientists could imitate that, they could benefit in ways they never imagined. Since then, Benyus, forty-five, has continued to make biomimicry -- a term she coined--her cause, working to match biologists with companies that can benefit from their expertise. Beyond the half dozen or so firms she advises directly, she estimates that nearly two hundred more companies and academic labs are pursuing biomimetic research. An example: Lucent Technologies scientists recently discovered that a certain deepwater sponge is able to make glass without heating sand to extreme temperatures, and so may hold the key to developing fiber-optic cable that is virtually unbreakable, more malleable, and more efficient at carrying light. &amp;quot;The best thing about it,&amp;quot; Benyus says, &amp;quot;is once a biomimic, always a biomimic. As larger firms get involved, they&amp;#039;ll keep at it,&amp;quot; knowing they can produce better --a nd potentially more profitable -- products. And that means such innovations will soon become ubiquitous parts of our lives. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a2649/esq1203-dec-benyus/>