One feather drifts down to rest in an about-to-be-mowed meadow. The patterning and design, a marvel of evolutionary engineering. Insatiably curious? Well, let’s go take a look.
Upon seeing the feather, intuition (felt more than thought) says “this is something amazing.” Photographs capture the details. Curious about which species from which this feather came – the closest match seems to be a great horned owl (male), as seen (third from right) on The Feather Atlas of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Looking at it – really seeing the way it is formed – provided a key for a solution to engineering a knitted neck transition of a Noro (“The World of Nature” is the company motto) banded sweater. Study physics and ponder that the more humans learn as a collective whole, the natural world of a universe is revealed to be stranger than can be imagined – and a ready resource standing by for solutions to manmade issues.
From an interview by Lesley Stahl, CBS 60 Minutes correspondent, with Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti, CERN director-general: “Is it possible that there’s — and I read this in science fiction, that there’s a whole dimension — a dimension that we don’t even know about?” – Stahl.
“Absolutely. There are theories in part — theory in particle physics that predicts the existence of additional dimensions. String theories, for instance, they require seven additional dimensions. So, as experimentalists we should, with our high-tech instruments like the Large Hadron Collider, just listen to nature and to what nature wants to tell us.” – Gianotti
“One of their biggest goals is shining a light on dark matter and dark energy which are among the great remaining mysteries of modern science and reminders of how little we know about the universe.” – From the script of The Collider, a segment which aired on Nov. 8, 2015. Read the full interview. Fourteen inventions inspired by nature reported on Bloomberg. Designed-by-nature products for the medical industry from the Washington Post.
Observed from walking a meadow with dogs, with time and space enough to think.