"A lady said, 'What's your solution?'
I said, 'There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.'
She said, 'The people demand solutions!'
- Thomas Sowell

One day in 1948, the Swiss engineer George de Mestral was cleaning his dog of burrs picked up on a walk when he realized how the hooks of the burrs clung to the fur. His realization led to the invention of Velcro -- and a multimillion-dollar industry.

De Mestral wasn't the first to be inspired by natural selection's engineering solutions. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, drew from nature in his designs for flying machines and ships.

But while biomimetics, as the field is now known, has a long history, until recently Velcro has been the only major commercial success. Now, as technological capability catches up with intellectual inspiration, biomimetics is starting to fulfill its potential.

"At present there is only a 10 percent overlap between biology and technology in terms of the mechanisms used," said Julian Vincent, professor of biomimetics at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. "So I feel that there is huge potential."

Vincent knows better than most. He is director of the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies and one of the driving forces in the emerging field.

Network-centric warfare demands robust systems that can respond automatically and dynamically to both accidental and deliberate faults. Adaptation of fault-tolerant computing techniques has made computing and information systems intrusion-tolerant and much more survivable during cyber attacks, but even with these advancements, a system will inevitably exhaust all resources in the face of a sustained attack by a determined cyber adversary. Computing systems and information systems also have a tendency to become more fragile and susceptible to accidental faults and errors over time if manually applied maintenance or refresh routines are not administered regularly. The Self-Regenerative Systems (SRS) program seeks to address these deficiencies by creating a new generation of security and survivability technologies. These "fourth-generation" technologies will bring attributes of human cognition to bear on the problem of reconstituting systems that suffer the accumulated effects of imperfect software, human error, and accidental hardware faults, or the effects of a successful cyber attack. The overarching goals of the SRS program are to implement systems that always provide critical functionality and show a positive trend in reliability, actually exceeding initial operating capability and approaching a theoretical optimal performance level over long time intervals. Desired capabilities include self-optimization, self-diagnosis, and self-healing; it will be important for systems to support self-awareness and reflection in order to achieve these capabilities.

Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union"
-Frank Lloyd Wright

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
- Buckminster Fuller

"No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other." - Frank Lloyd Wright

Intel has released software that lets computers read lips, a step forward that could lead to better voice recognition applications.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
- Ted Nelson

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.
- Bernoulli

It is impossible to make significant change by force.
The only way to make significant change is to make the thing you want to change obsolete.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

The world needs uninhibited thinkers, not afraid of far out speculations;
it also needs conservative hard-headed engineers who can make their dreams come true.
-Arthur C. Clarke

When all you have is a hammer... everything looks like a nail.
- Unknown