Birds do it. Bees do it. And now, increasingly, aircraft engineers are falling in love with the idea of studying the natural world to find solutions that can be adapted and applied to the design of ...

Charles Darwin was a man inordinately fond of beetles. He once caught a rare specimen in one hand, when another, even more remarkable, beetle showed up. He snatched that one up with his other hand.

Biomimicry, which means the imitation of the living, seeks to learn from natural selection and apply those principles to human engineering, putting nature’s lessons into practice using technology. A ...