It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature: Functional Materials in Insects

Over the course of their wildly successful proliferation across the earth, the insects as a taxon have evolved enviable adaptations to their diverse habitats, which include adhesives, locomotor systems, hydrophobic surfaces, and sensors and actuators that transduce mechanical, acoustic, optical, thermal, and chemical signals. Insect‐inspired designs currently appear in a range of contexts, including antireflective coatings, optical displays, and computing algorithms. However, as over one million distinct and highly specialized species of insects have colonized nearly all habitable regions on the planet, they still provide a largely untapped pool of unique problem‐solving strategies. With the intent of providing materials scientists and engineers with a muse for the next generation of bioinspired materials, here, a selection of some of the most spectacular adaptations that insects have evolved is assembled and organized by function. The insects presented display dazzling optical properties as a result of natural photonic crystals, precise hierarchical patterns that span length scales from nanometers to millimeters, and formidable defense mechanisms that deploy an arsenal of chemical weaponry. Successful mimicry of these adaptations may facilitate technological solutions to as wide a range of problems as they solve in the insects that originated them.Insects have evolved manifold optimized solutions to everyday problems. The diversity and precision of their hierarchical material adaptations often outsmart and outperform current man‐made approaches. These materials hence provide an excellent basis for the inspiration of new technological approaches by taking design cues from nature’s solutions.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143760/1/adma201705322.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143760/2/adma201705322_am.pd

Aviation Noise Impact Management

This open access book provides a view into the state-of-the-art research on aviation noise and related annoyance. The book will primarily focus on the achievements of the ANIMA project (Aviation Noise Impact Management through Novel Approaches), but not exclusively. The content has a broader theme in order to encompass. regulation issues, the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) balanced approach, progresses made on technologies and reduction of noise at source, impact of possible future civil supersonic aircraft, land-use planning issues, as well as the core topics of the ANIMA project, i.e. impact on human beings, annoyance, quality of life, health and findings of the project in this respect. This book differs from traditional research programmes on aviation noise as the authors endeavour, not to lower noise at source, but to reduce the annoyance. This book examines these non-acoustic factors in an effort to help those most affected by aviation noise – communities living close to airports, and also help airport managers, policy-makers, local authorities and researchers to deal with this issue holistically. The book concludes with some recommendations for EU, national and local policy-makers, airport and aviation authorities, and more broadly a scientifically literate audience. These recommendations may help to identify gaps for progress in terms of research but also genuine implementation actions for political and regulatory authorities