Drones are becoming a bigger part of our lives, and soon they’ll be able to do a lot of the dangerous stuff humans can’t (or shouldn’t) do. Soon, unmanned flying drones will map out uncharted territory, track forest fires, examine dangerous radioactive sites, and maybe even explore other planets.

This bio-drone is made of almost all natural, biodegradable materials. Once it has carried out its mission, it will harmlessly biodegrade wherever it goes down. The vehicle gets to perform an important function without then leaving a harmful remainder behind.

More importantly, the drone doesn’t have to return, so there will be no worrying about it bringing back dangerous materials. It won’t have to come back within a specific time period for re-charging, so it will be able to travel further and perform more work.

The drone was designed by a large team of students from Stanford, Brown, and Spelman along with Ecovative, a company developing items made from mycelium, a mushroom-related material (the vegetative part of a fungus). It is lightweight and can grow no matter where it is – even in space.

It wouldn’t biodegrade after landing on its own; rather, the material is coated with a special set of enzymes the trigger the drone to break down. The cue to start biodegrading can be programmed into the enzymes so that the drone only breaks down after a certain amount of time or after the drone crashes.

The post Biodegradable Drone Melts Away Harmlessly After a Mission first appeared on Gajitz.

What if time were told not by the seconds, minutes, and hours on the clock, but the slow and gradual passage of the months? The inevitable march of time carries on whether we want it to or not, and nature is the perfect intuitive clock. Japanese design group Bril is combining an age-old tradition with a new aesthetic to make a clock (or perhaps it is better referred to as a calendar) with a modern look.

In traditional sake making, a ball of bundled cedar boughs known as a sugidama is used to mark the rice wine’s readiness. The boughs are plucked when the sake is made and slowly fade away to brown over time. It takes them precisely a year to die. When the boughs are completely brown and dead, the sake is ready to drink.

The Coniferous Clock uses the same cedar boughs to measure time. They are mounted on nails in a circular cedar frame and die ever so gradually. At the end of the year you can remove the dead boughs and mount new ones. A swinging pendulum makes the visual distinction between a timepiece and a simple piece of nature-inspired wall art.

The clock won’t tell you anything that you can’t see for yourself by simply looking out a window, but it is a rather pretty way to mark the passage of time without the nerve-grating ticking of clock hands. More importantly, it is a way to bring nature into the home to commune with it in some small way each and every day.

The post Time to Die: Annual Clock Marks Time by Dying Tree Leaves first appeared on Gajitz.

Fire ants are notoriously nasty little bugs, using their noxious venom to sting other insects to death and sting humans into severe pain and irritation. But the tawny crazy ant, an invasive species of ant quickly spreading over the US Gulf Coast area, has a secret weapon that perfectly defeats the fire ants’ offense. The tawny crazy ants secrete a substance that neutralizes the fire ants’ deadly venom.

Fire ant venom is chemically a base, while the crazy ants’ venom is an acid which cancels out the fire ants’ poison. What’s even cooler, though, is that the mixture of these two liquids creates something called an ionic liquid. Humans have been creating these odd viscous substances for a long time, but they have never before been observed in nature.

In a paper published in the German chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, researchers postulate that this may not be the only instance of natural viscous liquids. The human-made variety is more or less liquid salt and is used extensively in batteries, solvents, sealants, and a wide variety of other applications. Finding a biological source of the material could prove endlessly useful for creating these and other materials without the need for a manufacturing process.

The post Fighting Ants Create a Liquid Never Before Seen in Nature first appeared on Gajitz.