This Sandgrouse Just Took the Royal Society to Design School

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s ID the Future takes a look at how scientists from MIT and Johns Hopkins University are picking up clever engineering tricks by studying the feather design of the Namaqua sandgrouse. Ordinary bird feathers are already a master class in ingenious design, but as Jochen Mueller and Lorna Gibson show in a recent Royal Society Interface paper, the males of this desert-dwelling sandgrouse from southwestern Africa “have specially adapted feathers on their bellies that hold water, even during flight, allowing the birds to transport water back to the chicks at the nest.” Episode guest Brian Miller details the ingenious design of these feathers and tells how they are inspiring human inventions, one of which could help desert communities collect water Read More ›

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0:00.0	I. D. The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:12.4	Can biology inspire Human Technology? I'm Casey Luskin with ID the Future and today we have on the show with us Dr Brian Miller who is research coordinator at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
0:25.4	He holds a bachelor's degree in physics with a minor in engineering from MIT and a PhD in
0:30.4	physics from Duke University.
0:32.4	He's a very widely traveled speaker on the topic of
0:35.6	intelligent design and he helps to manage our ID3.0 research program here at Discovery, in particular
0:41.6	our engineering research group.
0:43.7	So Brian, it's great to have you on the show with us today.
0:46.5	Thank you, it's a pleasure.
0:47.9	So the occasion for our conversation
0:49.8	is a story that recently came out in Science Daily about an article that was published in the Journal of the Royal Society interface.
0:57.0	And this is about how engineers are trying to mimic the feathers on an African bird to find a better way to hold water.
1:05.9	So this article detailed the ability of this amazing bird called the Namakwa sandgrouse that lives
1:11.2	in Namibia of southern Africa to use its feathers to hold water so it can carry water back to its young.
1:18.0	So could you please provide some background about what this research was all about?
1:22.0	Sure, it was research conducted out of John Hopkins University in a partnership with MIT and the main researchers were Yolken-Muler from Hopkins and then Lorna Gibson from MIT.
1:35.2	They were part of engineering departments.
1:37.4	And what they did is they looked at this particular bird which had an amazing ability because
1:41.5	it lives in African deserts and it typically will nest about 20
1:45.5	miles from watering holes. So what it does is it'll actually fly to the watering
1:49.5	holes and it'll go in the water and its feathers on its belly have very unusual properties.
1:55.0	They're very different from other feathers and they form almost a cup-like structure
	...

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