Adapt: how we can learn from nature’s strangest inventions

In May 2016, David Hu, a researcher at Georgia Tech University, US, was featured three times on Senator Jeff Flake’s list of the most wasteful scientific uses of government funds. Why? Because his research into why animals behave in particular ways was overlooked as frivolous. Hu’s studies have varied from how dogs shaking helps them dry themselves more quickly to how frogs use their saliva to catch prey, but it’s all in the name of looking for ways that we can learn from nature to engineer better materials and devices.

Hu’s work on fire ants linking their legs together to form rafts to escape flooding in the Amazon is mentioned in the sixth chapter of Adapt, and it’s my fascination with some of his recent studies that first drew me to this book.