We're constantly imitating nature.
Artificial intelligence researchers study the way babies learn to right themselves after falling down to help train robots to behave similarly.
We're still learning new things about flight dynamics and wing design from butterflies and other animals.
If you've ever carefully tiptoed across the floor to keep from disturbing someone, you're mimicking how a deer walks to avoid alerting predators to its presence.
Okay, that one's a stretch, but if you've ever watched a deer do this, it sure seems like one heck of a coincidence.
In any case, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It's also how modern science works - creating models for simple structures in order to approximate the real world. When we succeed, we learn; when we fail, we learn more. It's a painstaking process of trial and error called the scientific method.
Every year the biotechnology industry comes one step closer to learning how to cure our ills and extend the human lifespan. We have further to go than we've come, to be sure, but getting here was no easy trick. After all, biotech research is attempting nothing short of unveiling the secrets of life.
Why am I telling you all this? Because, this is the same thought process that changed my opinion about Second Life being over-hyped - an opinion many of you have recently expressed. ... Read more
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