Termites as architects
While some power companies scour the globe for steady winds to drive giant turbines, a biologist is turning to lowly termites and their lofty mounds to understand how to harness far more common intermittent breezes, seeking ideas that could drive nature-inspired building systems whose “sloshing” air movement could provide ventilation and cooling. J. Scott Turner, a biology professor at the State University of New York, brought his termite-mound studies to Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Wednesday (Oct. 20) in a talk sponsored by Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Turner’s topic, “New Concepts in Termite-Inspired Design,” presented the results of years of research into the structure of termite mounds in Namibia, including an extraordinary effort to fill a mound’s tunnels with plaster and then slice off millimeter-thick layers to create a cross-sectional map of the insides. Turner’s work debunked some 50-year-old assertions that termite mounds’ complex tunnel structure works to...