In a BusinessWeek Special Report, February 2008, Matt Vella reports on how Janine Benyus, dean of the burgeoning "biomimicry" design movement, helps companies look to the natural world to help take their business green.

Janine Benyus, talking at TED, describes biomimicry as learning an idea from an organism and then applying it - the conscious emulation of life's genius. Bioteaming, then, is the biomimicry of social structures- taking ideas from Nature about how groups perform and intra-operate, and applying them to enhance how we humans work together in groups and teams. Doug Philips aka teamite#222* and bioteams guest author muses.

Rory Cellan-Jones reports on Inscentinel, a young British company, which trains bees to detect explosives without harming them The bees are trained by rewarding them with sugar whenever they detect the target substance.

New Scientist magazine reports that with the availability of ever more powerful computers, the advent of distributed computing "grids" and the emergence of multicore chips, evolutionary or genetic algorithms are now developing better designs than human designers. However there are concerns that some of these designs may be unpredictable as no human designer knows exactly how they work.

Dancing bees help businesses describes how researchers at Cardiff University have developed an algorithm based on the honeybee waggle dance to help companies optimize their business processes.

The Center for Biologically-Inspired Design at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have announced a conference in Biologically Inspired Design in Science and Engineering on May 10-12.

Learning from mother nature's designs becomes scientific mainstream

A new scientific discipline biomimicry (also known as biomimetrics) is gaining a lot of attention.

Defined as "taking ideas from nature and implementing them in another technology such as engineering, design, computing, etc."