Category: Notes

Beyond just dinosaur hunting, Lacovara shares how his dinosaur hunting helped him realize how small and unique our place in existence is.

Kenneth Lacovara: Hunting for dinosaurs showed me our place in the universe

“Learning about the natural world is one thing; learning from the natural world — that’s the switch,” Benyus says. She shares many experiences she has had in teaching engineers to learn from nature.

She asks:

1. How does life create things? (Life does not “heat, beat and treat”)
2. How does life make the most of things? (Life gives information to matter)
3. How does life make things disappear in a system? (Because life deals with systems, not things)

Janine Benyus: Biomimicry’s surprising lessons from nature’s engineers

Combing observations from a variety of sources, Jully shares the story of developing shark-deterring technologies.

Hamish Jolly: A shark-deterrent wetsuit (and it’s not what you think)

So… Apparently, trees communicate and swap resources with each other. Simard talks about her experiments tracking chemical exchanges between trees. Her research shows that forests not just a collection of trees but highly complex systems in which “mother” trees send support to their seedlings, pull back their roots to provide growing room, and send encoded chemical messages signalling danger.

Suzanne Simard: How trees talk to each other

Babies are surprisingly brilliant at learning. In years past, we thought about babies and child as resource sinks, thinking that human learning was a long, grueling process that took decades.

Gopnik shows some of her research that shows 4 years old are better identifying unlikely hypothesis than adults. Further, they are better able to think up variations of hypotheses much more rapidly.

Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?