Learning Organically

This is what we did on Thursday:
Got on the little orange bus

Went to the Botanical Gardens

There we learned about all the ways that plants kill things, reproduce, and use energy efficiently.  I had never been so interested in a green house before.  I wish we could have taped each explanation of the plants and their mechanisms for world domination.  Here are some of the plants I thought were the most exciting:

Orchids

I was inspired by the way they are pollinated. They direct the bees where to go and
basically make them passively do all the work. It is a two-step process that is very
inefficient, but using sticky surfaces the plants may eventually be pollinated. I think
it would be neat to make an interactive smart surface that was so smart it could make
people act the way it wanted them to. Oh, and they're pretty, too.

Killer Plants

The two pictures above are from two different plants that get nutrients from insects by trapping them.  The bugs get stuck and then just sit and rot until they are broken down enough for the plant to use them for nutrients.  The simplicity and passiveness of this system could be used as inspiration, though for our purposes we probably wouldn't want rotting insects.

Window Plants!

Also known as living rocks, the window plants that inspired the team to use fiber optics in Project 2 were in the green house!  The chlorophyll is actually in a small layer along the edges of the plants and the window on top allows the sun to be penetrating in at all times of the day to reach the chlorophyll.  The plants are also camouflaged as rocks so that predators won't find them.  Maybe our prototype could have a bio-inspired camouflage and have an unrelated purpose...our act biomimetic and look like something inorganic.