OK, so the title of this book could be a bit catchier, and at 11 years old it is out of date, but it really does have some good stuff for the biomimeticist.  The materials in question include layered composites like nacre and fractally organized tissues like tendon.  The writing is a bit dense, but the content is quite interesting.  A section of the book is devoted to natural material hierarchy followed by a section on manufactured hierarchical organization. 

The review in Science said…

Hierarchical Structures in Biology As a Guide for New Materials Technology (Nmab, 464) 

NAS Press free PDF book

Two books entirely devoted to the biologically inspired robots I have been writing about.  They cover all the biggies here: the lobster, the cockroach, even the tuna. These robots have a long way to go before they will be a really useful example of biomimicry, but its fun to keep an eye on this field.

Biologically Inspired Intelligent Robots (SPIE Press Monograph Vol. PM122)

Biorobotics

I am a comparative biomechanic and my training relied heavily on the books by Steve Vogel and his colleague Steve Wainwright at Duke University. They helped to train a generation of my colleagues with now classic volumes like Life in Moving Fluids, Axis and Circumference, Life’s Devices and Mechanical Design in Organisms. The field has moved considerably since the publication of these volumes so it’s great to see a new and heavily updated volume from Vogel.

Comparative Biomechanics - Life’s Physical World
will serve a number of purposes over the next several years. For one, it is a well written, approachable primer to the interaction of biological problems and physics/engineering. Engineers and physicists need readable introductions to the complexity of biological design and this book does a reasonable, though not in depth, job of pointing out the myriad biological systems to which interesting math can be applied. Biologists in their turn need usefully written mathematically oriented tracts in order to understand the predictive power of the physical sciences. Since most biologists are not comfortable with post-pre-calculus mathematics the tone and clarity of this book will be a great bridge into the useful fields of fluid mechanics, elastics and dynamics, heat transfer and flow.

The book must have started as an updating of Life’s Devices, but somewhere along the way a complete rewrite of Life in Moving Fluids ended up forming the beginning of the book. There is great material on both solids and fluids, but by far the strongest work is in fluids. In part this is because there are so many equations in fluid mechanics that have application to biology (we are after all quite wet), these equations are in dire need of a clear explanation. From Bernoulli to Navier-Stokes, Vogel does an excellent job of walking the reader through both the derivation and the relevance. The explanations and derivations stay with the reader far longer than would be expected for heavy material of this sort.

This book is a great place to start when you are wondering what is known about the biomechanics of subject X, but it is also fascinating reading as a biological exploration.

Stanislas Gorb, of the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, has written a bookabout attachment mechanisms of insects. Though murderously expensive new ($145) since ‘dry’ adhesives are one of the hottest topics in nanobio and biomimetics this book does have a market. The savvy lay person could certainly learn enough from Gorb’s easygoing style to tease fact from hype in press coverage of the issue.

If you are looking for a really good in depth treatment of the phenomena of friction and attachment as they relate to surfaces and biological materials this is a great place to start. The material is a competent survey of the primary literature in the field and presents little new data not published elsewhere. On the other hand it does a fantastic job of summing up groups of papers that are difficult for the lay person to approach.

The introductory chapters explain the physical phenomena involved in attachment, and they are general enough topics that they nicely explain gecko adhesion as well. The book goes on to divide attachment strategies into either ‘hairy’ or ’smooth’. The former relies on large numbers of flexible projections to maximize realized contact area with a substrate. In contrast, ’smooth’ attachments rely on viscoelastic deformation of the attachment surface to flow into the nooks and crannies of irregular surfaces.

Among the most interesting topics covered in the book is one on the scaling of attachment force. Gorb reviews the literature for insects, spider and lizards and shows that there is a clear relationship between the amount of force required to support the animal and the number and width of the tiny hairs on the foot (or toe) pad. For those who are interested in the commercial possibilities of ‘dry’ adhesives this provides a clear link between the stickiness and the surface complexity (and hence cost) of possible biomimetic materials.

There are also very nice sections in the book that deal with the interaction between insects and the plants they walk on. This area of research is a hot topic because the nature of plant surfaces is such that they can be hard for insects to hang on to.