
Manta rays’ food-capturing mechanism may hold key to better filtration systems - sahin-boydas
https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/manta-rays%E2%80%99-food-capturing-mechanism-may-hold-key-better-filtration-systems
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kris-s
The youtube link in the article has a nice animation of how mantas filter:
[https://youtu.be/2nRN1ZJPs98](https://youtu.be/2nRN1ZJPs98)

This approach to problem solving is one of my favorite. Instead of thinking
hard about a problem: observe nature and leverage a few billion years of
evolutionary problem solving that's already been done.

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GW150914
That strategy can be very successful, but sometimes what you discover is that
nature often depends on things like regenerating materials, and other things
we can’t come close to replicating. We can understand how a dragonfly flies,
but we can’t replicate it efficiently. Nature is also often unconcerned with
long service lives, again looking at the dragonfly. What we want from our
machine tends to be durability and reparibility, not to mention affordability.

Nature can only get us so far with the current state of the art of materials
science.

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dbcurtis
Seems to me that one of the more interesting directions that genetic
engineering could take is manufacturing of exotic materials. The safety issues
would be much easier to manage as well if the GM organisms are kept in vats in
a lab instead of planted in farm fields, etc.

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dogma1138
It already has, spider goat: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-
environment-16554357/t...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-
environment-16554357/the-goats-with-spider-genes-and-silk-in-their-milk)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSteel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSteel)

~~~
GW150914
Spider goat! That’s really amazing, and the promise of spider silk and related
materials to everything from body armor to surgery can’t be overstated.

Also...

Spider goat, spider goat, doing whatever a spider goat does. Is it a spider?
No it’s a goat. Spider goat. Spider goat.

