Kingfisher and bullet train

30 Animals That Made Us Smarter

BBC

Technology

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2019

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The story of the bird and the engineer. How the kingfisher inspired the design of a train. The 500 series Shinkansen, also known as bullet train, is one of the fastest in the world. It is also quiet, but that was not always the case. This is the tale of Japanese engineer Eiji Nakatsu, the kingfisher, an owl, a penguin and biomimicry. With Patrick Aryee. #30Animals

Transcript

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0:00.0	My earliest memory of watching a spider weaving its web was when I was about 11 years old.
0:20.0	It was in the back garden of our new house.
0:23.0	Of course, I'd seen spiders webs before, but they were all quite small,
0:27.0	no bigger than the palm of my hand.
0:29.0	But this one was about two feet wide,
0:32.0	easily the biggest I'd ever laid eyes on.
0:35.0	And what's even more impressive was the size of the insects entangled in the sticky strands.
0:41.0	Big bugs, solid juicy flies trapped in thread so delicate you could hardly see them.
0:47.0	I moved in closer and very gently touched the web with my finger. Immediately I jump back with excitement as a spider scuttled across the silk and threads to investigate.
0:58.0	Spider silk is amazing stuff.
1:02.0	Wait for weight, it's about five times as strong as steel,
1:06.0	yet it's finer than human hair
1:08.0	and can be stretched several times its length
1:11.0	before it breaks.
1:12.0	Astonishing. For all the marvels of human engineering, the big bridges,
1:17.3	they clever buildings, the ships, the rockets and trains, I don't think anything comes
1:22.1	close to a spider's web.
1:24.0	There's so much we can learn from the Animal Kingdom.
1:27.0	Hello, I'm Patrick Aye, and welcome to the very first episode of my brand new podcast
1:35.8	30 Animals That Made Us Smarter from the BBC World Service. It's a series about
1:40.8	animals and also about us, humans all around the globe.
1:45.0	More specifically, it's all about the remarkable things animals can do
	...

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