Automotive SCIENCE FAIR; Locusts, fish, bionic bones- car engineers look to nature.(NEWS)

Byline: PHIL PATTON

iN THIS YEAR OF THE BICENtennial of Charles Darwin's birth, evolution is being reappreciated. Among other things, evolution turns out to be a powerful designer and engineer, and automobile designers and engineers are increasingly looking to learn from it.

Consider locusts. The grasshopperlike insects most often associated with biblical plagues swarm relentlessly across plains and valleys without running into one another. This piqued the interest of engineers at Volvo who were working on the company's accident-avoidance systems.

The Volvo team came across the work of researchers at the University of Newcastle's Insect Vision Laboratory. In their swarms, it turns out, locusts respond quickly and reliably amid chatter or noise analogous to traffic jams. Re-searchers mapped the locust's nervous system, which feeds impulses from eyes and feelers almost directly to wing muscles to make the necessary corrections. Butand here may be the ultimate lessonnature had created a system in the insects that was so fast and powerful that the human designers could only imitate it. Human hardware and software could only roughly approximate the principles of the insect, but the idea became part of the Volvo system aimed at preventing pedestrian accidents.

The Volvo work is an example of what is called biomimicry. The term was popularized by Janine Benyus, a natural history writer whose Biomimicry: Innova-tion Inspired by Nature came out in 1997. She traced examples and case studies of nature inspiring human devices. One of the earliest biomimetic designs lay behind Velcro, famously inspired by a walk during which inventor George Mistral became curious about the mechanism of burrs catching in his dog's fur.

Benyus cited many examples that went even further. She soon found her phone ringing with inquiries from corporate executives and researchers. In response, she set up the Biomimicry Guild and Institute near her home in Missoula, Mont. She drew praise from Amory Lovins, the energy visionary who coined "drilling for oil under Detroit as a metaphor for energy savings and who founded the Rocky Moun-tain Institute. He praised Benyus's book as "unique and profound, touting her as one of Time magazine's visionaries for the future.

"Some 3.8 billion years of evolution have exposed the design flaws of roughly 99 percent of nature's creationsall recalled by the manufacturer, he declared. "The 1 percent that have survived can teach powerful lessons.