The practice of biomimicry already taps into nature's ingenuity oe for example, the famous hexagonal skin of Norman Foster's Gherkin was inspired by the Venus Flower Basket sponge,
-which enables us to grow organisms that do not exist in nature by manipulating their DNA oe to create trees that produce a natural light-producing protein usually found in jellyfish.
anthropology, tend to point up how similar humans are to other animals, not how different. Whatever sets us apart,
it is invulnerable to almost all forms of predators angry alligators being one possible exception Â. Boars are smart, fast, hard to hunt."
Worm therapy: Why parasites may be good for youjim Turk initially put his symptoms down to stress.
Two months after discontinuing the worm treatment the lesions rebounded to an average of 5. 8."The beauty of this is that the number of new lesions is really an objective, brutally honest answer,
 Old friendsfleming's trial in 2008 was the first to infect multiple sclerosis patients with live parasitic worms, also known as helminths,
and a shift away from farming lifestyles decreased our contact with soil, faeces and contaminated food where bacteria and parasites like helminths live.
Many of our human ancestors would have been infected with helminths, as are large numbers living in developing nations today.
When helminths infect individuals and attach themselves in their hosts'gastrointestinal tracts, the immune system launches an attack,
when Elliott and Weinstock first found that helminths protected mice against colitis, news spread fast.
In 2007, self-infected entrepreneurs Garin Aglietti and Jasper Lawrence founded a worm therapy start-up called Autoimmunetherapies in the US by harvesting hookworms plucked and sterilised from their own faeces,
However in 2009, the Food and Drug Administration defined helminths as biological products that could not be sold before having undergone a series of clinical trials
Herbert Smith, a financial analyst in New york bought hookworms, and pig and human whipworms from Wormtherapy and Autoimmunetherapies,
either travelling to Mexico or receiving mail-order worms from Lawrence. Smith was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 1996,
Today, he maintains a healthy population of hookworms, which he says have caused a complete remission."
Moises Velasquez-Manoff, a journalist, also visited Aglietti's Tijuana clinic to receive a dose of 30 hookworms for his allergies and asthma,
Fleming says he advises the multiple sclerosis patients who email him at a rate of around one a week against self-infecting with helminths."
 Testing stagenowadays, most researchers investigating helminthic therapies have abandoned bloodsucking hookworms in favour of pig whipworms,
who suffer from gluten intolerance, with hookworms. Gluten is introduced slowly into their diets to see
if the hookworms will suppress the disease's inflammatory response. Back in Wisconsin Fleming is continuing his studies on multiple sclerosis.
seeking to understand how helminths inhibit disease. Coronado Biosciences, a Massachusetts-based company, hopes to have results from two large studies being carried out in the US into the use of pig whipworm eggs to treat Crohn's disease by the end of the year.
It may therefore make sense to administer helminths as living probiotics. In the case of whipworms this means patients swallowing doses of live eggs;
in the case of hookworms they apply gauzes containing live larvae to their skin.""When you give someone a live worm,
it's like giving them the factory that makes the products and letting the factory do
"These worms are not benign, says Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston.
bona fide treatments based on the biology of the worms that can be scaled up and manufactured without the complexities
Hotez and others including Weinstock's group are working on identifying the molecules responsible for the effects of treatment with worms
Several discoveries have already been made with hookworms such as a protein that inhibits white blood cell activity and another with anticoagulant properties.
or England to attain illicit worms, awaits the trial results. He occasionally speaks to multiple sclerosis support groups about his experiences,
six lions lay dead in the dim headlights of an old land cruiser. Just hours earlier, dozens of Maasai men had descended upon them with sharpened spears in a fit of anger and frustration."
whose four goats had been killed by the lions.""The lions come again and again. Â Over the past several years, residents of the Kitengela plains have had an enormous problem.
The area lies on the edge of popular tourist destination Nairobi National park, a beautiful game park just 7 kilometres (4. 6 miles) from Nairobi's City Centre,
brimming with lions, rhinos, giraffes, cheetahs, and other wildlife. While the park is secured by an electric fence on three sides oe those that border the city oe the open end allows wildlife to spill out into Kintengela,
Lions have been straying outside the park at night and snacking on their form of convenience food oe local residents'cattle,
goat, and other animals. For many of the residents, livestock is their only livelihood, and they will go to any lengths to protect them oe including poisoning
As a result of conflicts like this, Kenya has been losing on average 100 lions a year, and there are now just 2, 000 remaining in the country.
is scared of the lions oe and for good reason. He's only 13, and small for his age oe no match for a hungry feline on the prowl.
But that didn't stop him at the age of 11 from wanting to find a way of protecting his family's livestock.
and maths class oe Richard cleverly invented a completely hacked yet remarkably effective system to keep the lions away,
he immediately remarked"petting the sharks at the aquarium, Â then, after a pause,"oh, and seeing Bono!
he noticed that lions would stay away when he walked around with a flashlight. Light fantasticthe system, called"Lion Lights  is about as basic as you can get,
constructed from LED bulbs from broken flashlights, an old car battery, a solar panel, and a motorcycle turning light indicator box.
According to Dr Charles Musyoki, a senior scientist in carnivore issues for Kenya Wildlife Service, the flickering lights is applied an ingenious design intervention that introduces a"serious risk consideration  for the lions.
While a steady light will not scare lions flickering lights from multiple sources confuses them, and indicates the presence of something larger than them,
although Lion Lights may seem simple, "no one else in Kenya had imagined putting the lights in this context.
and most of all is effective in keeping lions away, has impressed truly local residents. Richard has installed seven Lion Light systems for his neighbours,
and people all over Kenya have begun copying his approach. Crowdsourced conservationwith increasing pressures on land and resources,
near Amboseli, a game park in southwestern Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service has collared  several lions with tracking devices that send text messages to cell phones of rangers
Another service called Elephant 911 crowdsources information on incidents involving elephants oe such as suspected poacher activity
or elephants trampling crops-via SMS, allowing agencies to track hotspots of conflict or poaching.
The Save the Elephants organisation has fitted elephants with high-tech collars, which emit mobile phone and satellite signals, allowing rangers to track them via Google earth.
which hosts four of the world's last remaining seven northern white rhinos, owners plan to start test-flying a $75, 000 drone to live-stream information on the rhinos to rangers on the ground.
The cameras also have thermal imaging, allowing night patrols. Yet despite all of these efforts, Paula Kahumbu, a Kenyan conservationist and CEO of Wildlifedirect, says that sometimes it's the local, homegrown technologies like Lion Lights that work best."
"Technology can be gimmicky, Â she says.""There is a tremendous need to recognize local and practical ideas.
the Harrier jump jet. Designed by Ralph Hooper and John Fozard of Hawker Aircraft, this highly sophisticated 50-year old aircraft has been modified
but to bring it into line with the world of computers, fly-by-wire and digital technology.
Lungs of the planetit accounts for more than half of the planet's remaining rainforest and  is home to more than half the world's species of plants and animals.
Take giraffes, for instance. Males, called bulls, make casual visits to various groups over time in search of a cow who might mate with him.
While giraffes'social decisions are ruled by urine, hippos appear to rely on dung. The function and purpose of dung-showering is still only partially understood, according to biologist Richard Despard Estes.
What's clear is that dominant males defecate in order to mark the boundaries of their territories.
and copiously defecating, scattering dung up to 2 metres in radius by flapping its tail vigorously.
But there's more to hippo dung than simple territory demarcation. When territorial males approach females they respond in a manner known as submissive defecation.
then slowly wags her tail while defecating. In situations like this, dung-showering is thought to serve as a sign of submission.
a female was bitten on her tail by the lead male. While the tail bite slowed her down
she managed to briefly free herself before being bitten again, by the same male, on her body near her right pectoral fin.
Every spring in southern Manitoba, tens of thousands of red-sided garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis) emerge from their underground hibernation dens
. When a female garter snake emerges, she releases a pheromone that attracts hundreds of male snakes towards her.
As if that isn't enough, scientists discovered that some male snakes"cross dress Â; they release female-like pheromones to attract other males.
One common assumption has been that pheromone-releasing males gain a reproductive advantage by diverting fellow male snakes attention from the female.
But Australian and US researchers think this solves a more mundane purpose oe male snakes pose as females to warm up quicker
and to reduce their exposure to predators. The mourning cuttlefish (Sepia plangon) takes its cross dressing even further.
This cephalopod, found in the waters off the eastern coast of Australia, controls the appearance of its skin with exquisite precision.
Plant-powered planes show promiseto the eye, there was nothing remarkable about the aging Falcon 20 jet as it took off from Ottawa International airport in Canada at the end of October in 2012.
For example, newly released figures collected by a plane trailing the Canadian Falcon 20 suggested that there was a 50%reduction in aerosol emissions compared to conventional fuel.
alongside the customary techno-utopian or counterintuitive visions of the future, was a champion camel-jumper,
who boasted of clearing seven camels in one leap, and the head of a pigeon-racing club, who described a recent competition where some of the unfortunate competitors were eaten by predators
and others died from the weather. Â Welcome to the first TED event at Sana'a, capital of Yemen, the poorest country in the middle East and a nation at the heart of the covert US war on Al Qaeda.
His talk featured a fish tank with a tomato plant growing out the top. His plan was to a build a large-scale aquaponic system in Mareb province, to the east of Sanaa,
One of the more popular moments at the event was a replay of a videotaped TED 2012 talk by University of Pennsylvania Professor Vijay Kumar on swarming drones, titled"Robots that fly...
Yet these little insects are causing a buzz by helping thousands of rural farmers in East Africa.
For the past twelve years, Kenyan social business Honey Care Africa has developed its innovative Ëoebusiness in a Beehive'model that has allowed low-income farmers to easily earn more money by producing honey.
The package gives farmers everything they need to start producing honey-a beehive, equipment, training, hive maintenance,
A simple beehive requires just 1 sq m (10 sq ft of land and two to three hours of labor per month.
"It's the only food that insects produce that humans eat regularly, it's packed with healthy micro-nutrients,
You need honeybees, space, wild flowers and ample time to for the bees to pollinate and produce it.
Sweet bonusin East Africa there are plenty of honeybees ready to meet the growing demand. But
Its package costs around $50 for two hives, and it has partnered with micro lending institutions like Kiva. org
Farmers can earn on average 15,000 Kenyan shillings ($175) per year from two hives, making their return on investment substantial.
but like the idea of a sweet income, by hiring fulltime beekeepers within villages to manage individual farmers hives.
and invest in more livestock-or hives. Shelf lifealthough beekeeping is a traditional oe and relatively low-tech business oe the organization is beginning to bring it into the 21st Century.
which allows a fleet of beekeeping technicians who inspects hives across the country to enter troves of live data on farmers,
hives, honey and harvesting into Samsung smartphones. This information feeds into a central dashboard, which helps the company track production
Alerts encourage regular hive inspection, whilst analytics automatically highlight opportunities and trends. The app also allows global consumers to connect more with Kenyan beekeepers,
and seeing the family trees and hives that produced, along with harvest date all on your screen."
Why animals also seek teenage kicksif you are an otter who wants to play a game of"chicken Â,
this treacherous bit of sea is known as the triangle of death for good reason oe the considerable threat of great white sharks is increased by the conspicuous absence of kelp that otters normally use to hide.
and a shark has the perfect recipe for a sea otter snack. Oh, and the waters are teeming with the dangerous parasite Toxoplasmosa gondii.
Doting otter parents do their best to keep juveniles from venturing into the triangle of death,
The only otters foolish enough to attempt an incursion into the triangle are adolescent males oe it turns out that human teenagers aren't the only animals that make bad decisions during the awkward transition between childhood and maturity.
 Not to be outdone by sea otters young Thomson's gazelles (Gazella thomsoni) make their own kinds of risky decisions.
When a group of gazelles detects nearby stalking predators such as cheetahs or lions, zoologist Clare Fitzgibbon discovered that instead of running they sometimes approach
and follow the predator, sometimes for more than seventy minutes. It's thought this sort of reverse stalking behaviour,
and birds, reduces the risk of being attacked. Lions and cheetahs stalk before they ambush prey,
and if the gazelle make clear their awareness of the predator's presence, it may delay its next hunting attempt.
This behaviour is seen only with predators who use a stalk -and-ambush strategy oe gazelle do not follow hyena,
despite the fact that more gazelle die from predation by hyenas than by cheetahs or lions. While it isn't only the juveniles who follow their predators oe adults do it too oe the younger gazelle face a much higher risk.
The probability of being killed while following a cheetah is one in 5, 000 for mature gazelle,
but only one in 417 for teenagers. Despite the incredibly high risk, predator following has persisted over evolutionary time.
Perhaps, Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers suggest, it provides the adolescent gazelles with an opportunity to learn more about their predators,
allowing them to better predict future encounters with cheetahs and lions. Boyz n the hoodthis falls in line with the current thinking in humans;
scientists say that teenagers'impulsive, infuriating traits may be the key to success when they are adults.
Human teenagers don't die at the hands (or jaws) of predators, like adolescent otters or young gazelle,
but their risks come in other ways. In the United states, according to the Centers for Disease Control, one third of teenage deaths are associated with car crashes.
Another leading cause of death among adolescent human males is homicide, representing 13%of deaths for that age group.
Like otters, males are more likely to die than females for every year between the age of 12 and 19,
African elephants (Loxodonta africana) also have a period of adolescence that lasts about a decade, between the ages of 10 and 20.
During this period of transition, male elephants leave the female-dominated groups into which they were born,
While elephant males become sexually mature by age 17, they usually don't successfully mate until their late 20s or early 30s, after their first musth, a period of pronounced sexual activity in male elephants
which is the result of especially high levels of testosterone. Despite being sexually mature by their late teens
males don't typically undergo musth in all-male elephant groups for at least another decade, and elephant teenagers generally behave themselves.
But a peculiar group of teenage males in South africa paints quite a different picture. As these elephants aged out of adolescence,
they began successfully breeding by age 18, a full decade before what is ordinary for their species. For typical 25-30 year olds,
targeting white rhinoceroses in particular. What made these male elephants so dangerously aggressive and so unusually sexually active?
When the young were growing up in South africa's Kruger National park in the 1980s, the mature males and females of their social groups were the victims of culling programmes.
An assessment of this and other stressed communities which had all been subject to elephant culling showed that male-male aggression accounted for almost ninety out of every hundred male deaths
rebellious teenagers are kept in line by the elder pachyderms. The adolescents lose the physical signs of musth minutes or hours after an aggressive interaction with a higher-ranking musth male  larger,
The wanton slaughter of white rhinoceroses was eliminated entirely. It seems as if elephant society evolved to account for the bad decisions associated with adolescence,
by having older males suppress the hypersexuality and hyperaggressiveness of younger males. Throughout the animal kingdom, adolescence is a tightrope Act as they gradually lose the care
and protection they receive from their parents, young animals of any species must strike a delicate balance between risk and safety.
If they play it too safe they'll suffer a lack of understanding about the dangers of the worlds in
or cheetah or killed at the hands of their friends. Most efforts to establish the root of risky decisions made by human teenagers focus on the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for mental processes like long-term planning and judgement.
compared to humans or elephants. Perhaps concerned human parents can rest a bit easier knowing that their worries echo throughout the animal kingdom.
If sea otter parents could, you can be sure they too would punish their offspring for breaking curfew
and staying out too late in the triangle of death. Without even so much as a phone call.
says one so-called"tutor queen Â. Can a jellyfish unlock the secret of immortality? Nathaniel Rich New york times 28 november 2012like Benjamin Button, a species of Turritopsis does something unusual oe it appears to age in reverse,
The idea that the secret to human immortality lies within this jellyfish is overstated somewhat, its cells may be immortal,
but who by night is a karaoke singer and minor celebrity called Mr Immortal Jellyfish Man.
"All that was lacking from my visit was an appearance from Ernst Blofeld clutching a white Persian cat.
or battery or charger for each device or brand of electronic equipment they buy, from phones to laptops to toothbrushes,
but they must also buy a new charger or adaptor when they upgrade from an iphone 4 to the iphone 5, for example.
Animals that can countnumbers are fun. So insisted my seventh grade teacher, but my stubborn thirteen-year-old self refused to believe him.
mathematical ability is widespread in the animal kingdom. Take the domestic chicken (Gallus gallus), a bird that many think of as having more to do with barbecue sauce than with arithmetic.
If a chicken sits in front of two small opaque screens, and one ball disappears behind the first screen,
If this sounds complicated for the three-day-old bird, think again. Infant chickens correctly approached the screen hiding more balls nearly 80%of the time.
Chimpanzees perform even better in their maths tests, succeeding in this sort of task 90%of the time.
In one experiment, researchers placed a chimpanzee in front of two sets of bowls that contained chocolate pieces.
the chimps had to select the set that had combined the largest number of chocolate pieces,
including gorillas, rhesus, capuchin, and squirrel monkeys, lemurs, dolphins, elephants, birds, salamanders and fish. Recently, researchers from Oakland University in Michigan added black bears to the list of the numerically skilled.
But the real maths wizards of the animal kingdom are the ants of the Tunisian desert (Cataglyphis fortis). They count both arithmetic and geometry as parts of their mathematical toolkit.
When a desert ant leaves its nest in search of food, it has an important task:
find its way back Home in almost any other part of the world, the ant can use one of two tricks for finding its way home, visual landmarks or scent trails.
The windswept saltpans of Tunisia make it impossible to leave a scent trail, though. And the relatively featureless landscape doesn't provide much in the way of visual landmarks, other than perhaps the odd rock or weed.
So evolution endowed the desert ant with a secret weapon: geometry. Armed with its mathematical know-how,
the desert ant is able to"path integrate Â. This means, according to ant navigation researchers Martin Muller and Rudiger Wehner,
that it is able to continuously compute its present location from its past trajectory and,
These desert ants calculate the distance walked by counting steps. Researchers discovered this by strapping stilts made of pig hairs onto the legs of the ants.
The ant's stilts made each individual step longer than it would have otherwise been,
making them overestimate the distance home. The ants calculate the direction they walk by calculating the angle of their path relative to the position of the sun,
using the same rules of trigonometry that were taught to me in the tenth grade. And what's more, the ants constantly update their calculations to correct for the sun's march across the sky.
All that in a nervous system comprised of as few as 250 000 neurons (compared to the approximately 85 billion neurons in the human.
"It's not clear if any of this works in a live animal, Â says Hecht."
Animals make collective decisions too. While nonhuman species typically don't vote to choose their leaders,
Near the end of spring or the beginning of summer, honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies grow too large for their hives,
The mother queen and half of the worker bees leave the hive to seek a new location,
while the daughter queen and the remaining workers remain in place. Minutes later, the departed group identifies a temporary resting place on a nearby tree branch,
and from there it surveys the local real estate. Several hundred scouts fan out in all directions in search of a suitable location for a new hive.
each scout communicates the location of the space they found by performing a waggle dance in front of their hive mates.
as if they were participating in some insect version of Dancing with the Stars. Some simply stop dancing,
however, is that the"hive mind  can make complex decisions only because the work is distributed across multiple individuals.
However, social species throughout the animal kingdom often have to make decisions without the aid of expert knowledge.
Such is the case for Tonkean macaques (Macaca tonkeana), a group of fruit-loving monkeys that live in the forests of Sulawesi,
Indonesia. Fruit trees are distributed randomly throughout the forest, with some areas containing more fruit than others.
So Tonkean macaques must decide which direction they will move in search of food, and they make those choices by majority vote.
When a particular Tonkean macaque wishes to move the group, he or she walks a few steps in the desired direction, pauses,
The other monkeys then decide whether to support the direction suggested, or whether to offer an alternative.
Like most primates, Tonkean macaques maintain a strict social hierarchy but all group members vote when it comes to these sorts of decisions.
or more dominant individuals who make decisions for other monkey species, such as the closely related rhesus macaques.
Democracy in this form is limited not to primates. African buffalo (Syncerus cafer) are large bovines distantly related to domestic cows that can be found grazing in forests, grasslands and swamps across the African continent.
Food patches vary for African buffalo, based on previous grazing history by the herd as well as by other species
Unlike the Tonkean macaques, only the adult female African buffalo are allowed to vote. But like the monkeys, all adult females vote regardless of their position within the dominance hierarchy.
Also like the monkeys, any female may propose a travel route. One thing animals don't appear to do,
though, is explicitly select their leaders, as humans do. For elephants, it's automatically the oldest female.
Chimpanzees are led by the male who is able to retain hold over his position as most dominant.
A female honey bee becomes queen based on what she eats in the first days of her life
(though worker bees do seem to have some influence over who becomes queen, giving honey bees the most humanlike election process).
But group decision-making is not unique to our species. Even the smallest worker bee, the youngest Tonkean macaque,
and the least dominant African buffalo get an equal say in making group decisions that directly impact their own survival.
Democracy, it seems, is far from being uniquely human. If you would like to comment on this article
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