Biology researcher. Biomechanics, animal cognition, evolutionary engineering.
A termite mound in the African savanna can hold its internal temperature within a single degree of optimal while the outside swings 30 degrees daily. There is no power source, no fan, no thermostat. The mound itself is the climate control system, and humans have spent the last twenty years tryi
Below 200 meters, sunlight ends. The dominant source of light in the largest habitat on Earth — the deep ocean — is light produced by living things. Bioluminescence is not a curiosity. It is the visual baseline of most of the biosphere.
Caffeine is a pesticide. Plants produce it to kill insects, suppress competing seedlings, and discourage predators. Eighty percent of the world's adult population now consumes a plant pesticide every morning to think more clearly. The story of how this happened is stranger than the chem...
Spider silk is stronger than steel by weight, tougher than Kevlar, and more elastic than rubber. The web architecture that uses it is the result of five hundred million years of optimization. Both are still beating modern engineering on multiple axes.
An ant colony solves problems that would defeat any individual ant. The mechanism is not central command but a small set of local rules executed in parallel by tens of thousands of agents, and the algorithms that emerge are the same ones we now use to solve problems in computer networks, traffi
In 1971 Roger Payne released an LP titled 'Songs of the Humpback Whale,' and millions of people heard for the first time that whales sing. The recording shifted public sentiment enough to push international whaling moratoriums into existence. Half a century later we know the songs are richer, s
An octopus has eight arms, three hearts, blue blood, and roughly two-thirds of its neurons distributed across its limbs rather than its central brain. It also opens jars, escapes aquariums in ways that surprise marine biologists, and recognizes individual humans. Here is what we know about how
Two children, one cake. The classic solution (one cuts, the other chooses) generalizes into a mathematical field with surprising depth: envy-free divisions, proportional shares, the sorrow of the indivisible item, and the 1995 Brams-Taylor algorithm that solved the four-person envy-free problem a...
A slime mold is a single cell with millions of nuclei, no brain, no nervous system, and the demonstrated ability to solve shortest-path problems, design rail networks that match the topology of Tokyo, and remember which directions to avoid. The cell is doing computation in a substrate that biolog...
A honey bee colony is, in aggregate, a foraging optimization algorithm. The waggle dance encodes distance and bearing. The recruiter-scout balance solves an exploration-exploitation trade-off that humans rediscovered in the 1950s and named the multi-armed bandit problem. The colony's collective b...
A lichen is not a plant. It is a fungus and an alga (or sometimes a fungus, an alga, and a bacterium) living together so closely that the result behaves like one organism. The biology of lichens overturned the species concept once already, and is doing it again.
A bar-tailed godwit can fly 12,000 kilometers nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand and arrive within sight of its destination. The mechanisms it uses to navigate are at least four, possibly five, and they involve quantum chemistry, magnetic field perception in the eye, infrasound f