Sharks Inspirational Quotes

You might not think a hippo could inspire terror. Screaming “Hippo!” doesn’t have the same impact as screaming “Shark!” But I’m telling you—as the Egyptian Queen careened to one side, its paddle wheel lifting completely out of the water, and I saw that monster emerge from the deep, I nearly discovered the hieroglyphs for accident in my pants.

Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow porcession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.

An adventurous life does not necessarily mean climbing mountains, swimming with sharks, or jumping off cliffs. It means risking yourself by leaving a little piece of you behind in all those you meet along the way.

I would rather go swimming with great white sharks than wade in romance 'cause I can never find the courage to ask her to dinner or even to dance.

Taking chances almost always makes for happy endings.

You were never created to please people; you were created to please God.

The greatest loss is the loss of one’s calling because we were listening to the wrong voices.

In calm waters you still find sharks.

Sharks aren't the monsters we make them out to be

When you are walking on water it is fear, not sharks, that sinks you.

If size really mattered, the whale, not the shark, would rule the waters.

Like a shark, your environment can eat you completely and it can heal your life like a medicine; depending upon its form

That sense of inferiority is just another word for fear. And fear is simply the self-deception that you are about to be separated from the thing you most value.

Sometimes in life, you try to hit life with a 'hui-tcha', but then life decides to hit you with a 'hui-tcha.' Do you know what you do in this predicament, when life hui-tcha's you? You go AGAIN!

Sharks don’t eat fish because of anything the fish do. They don’t eat fish because those fish aren’t good enough fish, or because those fish aren’t nice enough to the sharks. Sharks eat fish because they are sharks.

Blue ocean shift is a systematic process to move your organization from cutthroat markets with bloody competition—what we think of as red oceans full of sharks—to wide-open blue oceans, or new markets devoid of competition, in a way that brings your people along.

Nothing can shark the wheels or crush the spirit of a determined people, said Dim Chukwuemeka Odimegwu Ojukwu

i would rather be a shark in a small pond with small fishis then a shark with bigger sharks then you

He who cannot swim should neither chase the dolphins nor play with sharks. For him disaster awaits like sunrise.

Fetch me more sharks that I might jump them!

I've spent years like a dead fish, now it's time to rule the sea like a shark.

I must be at the command of the Lord, not the dictates of people, pressures, or my own issues.

Emotional hurts are like cancers of the soul. If we don’t get them out, they can poison the whole soul and body.

We must have heart and overcome if we are to thrive in life and not merely survive.

If we are living for the approval of others, we aren’t living for the approval of God.

You only need one approval, and that’s God’s!

If you have to perform for people’s approval, trust me, it’s not worth having.

Trust God and follow His will for your life! His love is unconditional.

Fear and intimidation is the most common and easy shark attack to fall prey to.

Be bold! Be courageous! God’s grace is backing you!

Why do we try to look for sharks? Why do we try to please the sharks that hurt us, hold us back, and keep us from our destinies?

If you allow sharks to dictate your decisions, they will try to exert their will on you more and more.

God has called us to love people, to be an example, and to be kind, but we have to take courage and be wise because there are sharks out there.

We don’t need to be fearful of sharks, but we do need to have an awareness of them.

Satan wants to use sharks to move you from your purpose. Don’t let him!

People may betray you, but you don’t need to take it personally.

If you let sharks call the shots, control, and manipulate you, it will lead you down a road of burnout, hopelessness, and even depression.

We may not be able to make people’s decisions, but we can choose to forgive and be made whole in Him.

You can never do for someone what they are not willing to do for themselves.

We must be compassionate but not enable people to blame or shame us out of God’s blessings.

If you are looking for a pathway to your dreams that won’t require you to have courage, you’ll be looking for the rest of your life.

Our goal should be to represent Jesus in every situation. When I was dealing with sharks, I didn’t have the answers, but God did.

If you keep your eyes on Jesus and prioritize your walk with Him, you’ll build your life on the right foundation.

The feeling of obligation can cause you to make bad decisions for your time, family, and destiny.

It’s not always destruction that keeps us from our destiny; it’s distraction.

Sharks will try to steal your time and intention, but you have to protect your focus. Keep your eyes on Jesus! He will carry you through persecution to victory!

We have to fight the battle for our destinies, not the battle for approval.

We can’t sacrifice the will of God for the approval of people.

People will criticize the very thing God has called you to do, saying it seems impossible to them, or too hard for them- but that’s why God called you to do it, not them.

When a shark has influence in your life, it makes you want to stay in the boat.

Conquering can give you courage.

The decisions you make every day are either building up or tearing down your life. What you meditate on, what you think about, and how you use your time set the course for your future.

Consider roadblocks in your life as sharks in sea and than imagine what you will do if you are swimming in sea. Will you stop swimming on seeing sharks or double , quadruple your efforts to reach the shore ?

You are not someone’s answer. You are an example of what the answer can do in someone’s life, and you are compelled to share how you did it by God’s Word and His grace, but only their yielding in obedience to God is their answer.

Sometimes people will misjudge your heart or what God has called you to do, but it’s not between you and them, it’s between you and God. When we stay focused on the call of God for our lives, He is able to create a legacy for us beyond anything we could have hoped or imagined!

what if the whole world was an ocean, do you need a horse to transport you above the water? or you have find a tree grown onto water to stand onto it! no, you have to get all you weapons, learn to swim and become a shark under water! thats when storms of the ocean will never bother you.

God has a plan for your life. He wants you to get your hopes up and to dream big, but I would not be wrong to tell you that there are going to be situations that come about which are intended by the enemy to hurt you, bother you, hinder you, and keep you back from your destiny...but the journey is worth it.

Inside the terminal at Keahole, they sat waiting to board, watching husky Hawaiians load luggage onto baggage ramps. Arriving tourists smiled at their dark, muscled bodies, handsome full-featured faces, the ease with which they lifted things of bulk and weight. Departing tourists took snapshots of them. 'That's how they see us', Pono whispered. 'Porters, servants. Hula Dancers, clowns. They never see us as we are, complex, ambiguous, inspired humans.' 'Not all haole see us that way...'Jess argued. Vanya stared at her. 'Yes, all Haole and every foreigner who comes here puts us in one of two categories: The malignant stereotype of vicious, drunken, do-nothing kanaka and their loose-hipped, whoring wahine. Or, the benign stereotype of the childlike, tourist-loving, bare-foot, aloha-spirit natives.

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, Saga University in Japan, and the University of California, Davis, proposed creating an artificial inorganic leaf modeled on the real thing. They took a leaf of Anemone vitifolia, a plant native to China, and injected its veins with titanium dioxide-a well-known industrial photocatalyst. By taking on the precise branching shape and structure of the leaf's veins, the titanium dioxide produced much higher light-harvesting ability than if ti was used in a traditional configuration. The researchers found an astounding 800 percent increase in hydrogen production as well. The total performance was 300 percent more active than the world's best commercial photocatalysts. When they added platinum nanoparticles to the mix, it increased activity by a further 1,000 percent.

Leaves are also teaching scientists about more effective capture of wind energy. Wind energy offers great promise, but current turbines are most effective when they have very long blades (even a football field long). These massive structures are expensive, hard to build, and too often difficult to position near cities. Those same blades sweep past a turbine tower with a distinctive thwacking sound, so bothersome that it discourages people from having wind turbines in their neighborhoods. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also estimates that hundreds of thousands of birds and bats are killed each year by the rotating blades of conventional wind turbines. Instead, inspired by the way leaves on trees and bushes shake when wind passes through them, engineers at Cornell University have created vibro-wind. Their device harnesses wind energy through the motion of a panel of twenty-five foam blocks that vibrate in even a gentle breeze. Although real leaves don't generate electrical energy, they capture kinetic energy. Similarly, the motion of vibro-wind's "leaves" captures kinetic energy, which is used to excite piezoelectric cells that then emit electricity. A panel of vibro-wind leaves offers great potential for broadly distributed, low noise, low-cost energy generation.

Over the past three years, I have been stopped on the street by great folks telling me their own stories: How they didn’t back down from the sharks, how they didn’t ring the bell, or how making their bed every morning helped them through tough times. They all wanted to know more about how the ten lessons shaped my life and about the people who inspired me during my career. This small book is an attempt to do so. Each chapter gives a little more context to the individual lessons and also adds a short story about some of the people who inspired me with their discipline, their perseverance, their honor, and their courage. I hope you enjoy the book!

The only sharks I’m afraid of are the ones that wear three-piece suits and write memos.

There is no greater thing you could do in your life and your work, than following your passions- in a way that serves the world and you.

A courtroom, Lawyers, Judges, rainbows, tilts, a card shark, a Royal Flush, a Bachelors Dream and a poker table is one hell of a story.

My iTunes playlist of sad-girl songs played in the background. Sometimes it helped with inspiration. Other times, it helped to remember why I refused to give love a second chance. Who needed that headache and heartache? I’d rather be eaten by a shark. Slowly.

Biomimicry is not just design that imitates or copies nature. It's design that asks the right questions in order to understand the mechanisms in nature's cornucopia of solutions, then uses that understanding to remedy problems-without creating new ones. You can start with an observation in nature and apply it, or start with a technological need and find a champion adapter in nature.

Pythagoras, in particular, was fascinated by the geometric proportions found throughout the natural world. Before Pythagoras, there is little evidence that musicians tuned their instruments using any particular system or scales. It's understood that Pythagoras experimented with a monochord, a single-stringed instrument with a moving bridge, to identify the way that plucking a string of various lengths creates particular musical notes. The proportions that he identified to be most harmonious happened to match the proportions of animal and plant growth (which we'll investigate later in this book). His observations were the foundation of the Western scale of music. This is a great example of isolating natural elements and combining them into a new art from. So magical seeming were his discoveries to conservative authorities that he feared for his life and started a secret society to study nature's mysteries more deeply.

Heraclitus theorized, by observing the natural world, that everything in existence was created from flow in nature-which physicists now agree to be true. Meanwhile, Plato saw particular angles and proportions everywhere and developed the science of geometry. More than two thousand years later, Einstein echoed Plato's understanding that "God ever geometrizes.

Future profits come to those who anticipate trends and work toward meeting them with services or products. In this case, the trend is clear. Biomimicry has always been a great source of wealth and opportunity. Now it can be a far greater wealth generator and problem solver than ever before. Most opportunities are still waiting to be identified or marketed, so the potential for intellectual property creation, new manufacturing methods, and breakthrough chemicals and materials is immense. Nothing short of the overhaul of the entire industrial sector is possible.

As a boy, I had the privilege of realizing that nature only moves and grows in precise, turbulent, spiraling flows. As an adult, I learned that human technology, in the main, tries to suppress turbulence. Nature doesn't waste the opportunity. It exploits the energy that is rolled up in turbulence. Birds, insects, fish, and the human heart clearly demonstrate the advantage of this strategy. Humans insist on traveling in straight lines and guzzle energy. Nature travels in spirals and sips energy. Truly grasping the significance of this simple fact throws open the door to reinventing the industrial world and gives us the tools to rescue our ailing planet, populations, and economy. By adapting and applying nature's spiraling geometries, I am confident that we can halve the world's energy consumption-without sacrifice.

Initially working out of our home in Northern California, with a garage-based lab, I wrote a one page letter introducing myself and what we had and posted it to the CEOs of twenty-two Fortune 500 companies. Within a couple of weeks, we had received seventeen responses, with invitations to meetings and referrals to heads of engineering departments. I met with those CEOs or their deputies and received an enthusiastic response from almost every individual. There was also strong interest from engineers given the task of interfacing with us. However, support from their senior engineering and product development managers was less forthcoming. We learned that many of the big companies we had approached were no longer manufacturers themselves but assemblers of components or were value-added reseller companies, who put their famous names on systems that other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had built. That didn't daunt us, though when helpful VPs of engineering at top-of-the-food-chain companies referred us to their suppliers, we found that many had little or no R & D capacity, were unwilling to take a risk on outside ideas, or had no room in their already stripped-down budgets for innovation. Our designs found nowhere to land. It became clear that we needed to build actual products and create an apples-to-apples comparison before we could interest potential manufacturing customers. Where to start? We created a matrix of the product areas that we believed PAX could impact and identified more than five hundred distinct market sectors-with potentially hundreds of thousands of products that we could improve. We had to focus. After analysis that included the size of the addressable market, ease of access, the cost and time it would take to develop working prototypes, the certifications and metrics of the various industries, the need for energy efficiency in the sector, and so on, we prioritized the list to fans, mixers, pumps, and propellers. We began hand-making prototypes as comparisons to existing, leading products. By this time, we were raising working capital from angel investors. It's important to note that this was during the first half of the last decade. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and ensuing military actions had the world's attention. Clean tech and green tech were just emerging as terms, and energy efficiency was still more of a slogan than a driver for industry. The dot-com boom had busted. We'd researched venture capital firms in the late 1990s and found only seven in the United States investing in mechanical engineering inventions. These tended to be expansion-stage investors that didn't match our phase of development. Still, we were close to the famous Silicon Valley and had a few comical conversations with venture capitalists who said they'd be interested in investing-if we could turn our technology into a website. Instead, every six months or so, we drew up a budget for the following six months. Via a growing network of forward-thinking private investors who could see the looming need for dramatic changes in energy efficiency and the performance results of our prototypes compared to currently marketed products, we funded the next phase of research and business development.

Our deeply troubled world can be reinvented through biomimicry. Nature's trillions of solutions throw open the door to far-reaching opportunities for building a better world; rescuing our ailing environment and atmosphere; and giving rise to a powerful, new, sustainable economy. To quote rock musician Tom Petty, "The future ain't what it used to be." No matter who you are, you can be a pioneer and leader in creating a new golden age on earth. A sweet twenty-first century and a third millennium are possible. Imagine. It's your life, your world, your opportunity, and your responsibility. The possibilities are endless.

Leonardo da Vinci was perhaps the greatest biomimic of all time. Not only did he precisely adhere to nature's proportions in his art but also spent the last ten years of his life studying-even obsessing over-the geometry and motions of natural flow. Based on years of observing birds in flight, Leonardo, the world's first fluid dynamicist, designed flying wings, a helicopter, and numerous other machines. His understanding of how the human heart actually operates-through manipulation of whirlpools-has only been rediscovered in the past decade. Even five hundred years later, the depth of Leonardo's insights into the secrets of nature's form and function cause scientists to marvel.

Zoopharmacognosy is the long-winded scientific label for studying animal self-medication. You may have seen your pet cat or dog chewing on grass when it's unwell. Chemicals in animal-chosen medicinal plants have been shown to have antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, and antihelminthic (antiparasitic worm) properties. Wild chimps eat Vernonia amygdalina to rid themselves of intestinal parasites and aspilla leaves for rheumatism, viruses, and fungal infections. Other animals chew on charcoal and clay to neutralize food toxins and rub themselves wtih citrus, clematis, and piper for skin ailments. Pregnant elephants have been seen to walk miles to find a certain tree of the Boraginaceae family that brings on labor. There are undoubtedly many more remarkable opportunities to be understood and adapted.

Dayna emphasized that the main challenge for companies deciding whether to adopt biomimetic solutions hinges on value generation. Profit is usually the only metric that is used, and while she recognizes the tremendous potential for profit offered by biomimicry, she stressed that there are also highly valuable, albeit less easily measured, benefits for companies that adopt biomimicry into their practices. Employees see real purpose and personal mission in their work. It creates passion, loyalty, creativity, and team building. Biomimetic product development starts from a nontoxic, nonharmful stance. Rather than designing for end effect and then compensating for toxicity and waste management, it also saves adopters considerable money on increasingly arduous and expensive environmental regulations-and future remediation liability.

Unbridled desire-the more, more, more syndrome-shows up over and over in humans interacting with the material world. We all want more-more money, more security, more luxuries, a better car, a bigger house, new clothes, to be more famous, a better job, a better spouse, a better nose or boobs, to be more enlightened, or for the world to have more peace-or more sex, more power, more hair, better weather. Everyone wants something he or she doesn't have and goes to great lengths to get it. And when we've got it? We want something else. We alone, among all the millions of life-forms on earth, seem to spend virtually no time satisfied. This appears to be a defining characteristic of modern humanity-the incessant, seemingly obsessive, often illogical striving for more.

A new green economy can easily suffer from the same predatory form of capitalism that created the global economic meltdown. As Kenny Ausubel of Bioneers notes, "The world is suffering from the perverse incentives of 'unnatural capitalism.' When people say 'free market,' I ask if free is a verb. We don't ave a free market but a highly managed and often monopolized market. We used to have somewhat effective antitrust laws in the United States. Now we have banks and companies that are 'too big to fail,' but in truth are too big not to fail. The resulting extremes of concentration of wealth and political power are very bad for business and the economy (not to mention the environment, human rights, and democracy). One result is that small companies can't advance too far against the big players with their legions of lawyers and Capitol Hill lobbyists, when in truth it's small and medium-sized companies that provide the majority of jobs as well as innovation.

The whole known universe is made of and according to nature's spiraling geometries-and nature uses them exclusively to move energy.

Through poorly managed drag or friction, we waste two-thirds of the energy we produce and, by so doing; we're destroying our environment and atmosphere three times the rate than if we didn't waste energy. The United States burns two billion dollars' worth of oil every day. The world burns four cubic miles of nonrenewable fossil fuels every year. That's a mound four miles long, four miles wide, and four miles high, equivalent to 21,120 feet-the highest mountain in the Andes or three-quarters the height of Mount Everest. We're very clever and resourceful extracting and processing more and more fossil fuels but we're pouring that energy into a bucket full of holes. We're wasting a large part of this energy by trying to force flow into straight lines.

The real issue, according to Brent, is a combination of cynicism and outright hostility from the status quo, which is quite typical with new paradigm-changing technologies, and the efficacy or otherwise of management, funders, and commercialization tactics. "The biggest obstacles we face in this world are doubt and greed," says Brent. "The world needs this technology. It's whether it happens now or in thirty years. It's just a matter of time before we're faithfully copying nature and creating benign cement.

Even the 1960's drug LSD is synthesized from a natural rye fungus called ergot. Incidentally, it's been proposed by some historians that the European witch hunts may have been a result of so-called witches hallucinating after eating ergot-molded rye. The theory is that their antics were caused by inadvertent "bad trips," which resulted in these unfortunate wretches being branded as witches, with up to one hundred thousand burned to death. Some might argue that heroin and LSD are examples of biomimicry gone wrong, but I believe the fault is with humans choosing to synthesize and distribute these molecules without consideration and management of their consequences.

Nature works on an entirely different principle. Its mandate for survival is to use the least amount of material and energy to get the job done-the job being to survive and re-create itself without damaging its foundational ecosystem. It doesn't stamp out flat plates; it doesn't create straight lines. For example, the ultraefficient human cardiovascular system has sixty thousand miles of plumbing, yet there's not a straight pipe inside. However, it is beyond compare when it comes to energy efficiency. How many machines can drive anything sixty thousand miles on on-and-a-half watts of power? That's less than the power consumed by many bedroom night-lights.

No matter which species or phenomena you study, from the lowest, wriggling life-form to the soaring masters of the sky, from the curl of a bird's beak to the intricacies that enable a snake to fly, science is uncovering a vast array of solutions to challenging human problems. These can provide companies with unassailable competitive advantages and the profits that go with them.

There are around two million new businesses started each year in the United States. Fewer than one thousand receive VC funding (a chance of one in two thousand). Typically, fewer than one hundred of those portfolio companies will create really significant wealth (one in ten VC investments). These are steep odds, so venture capitalists have developed fierce survival strategies about how, and in what, they invest their funds. They seek as high a return on their investment as possible in as short a time as possible-hundreds of times their investment within three years, if they can get it. Remember that a VC firm typically sees one significant success out of ten start-up companies. Your start up company, if successful, must therefore make enough profit, and the VC must have enough ownership, to compensate the investment firm for their other nine failures. That puts a lot of pressure on you to deliver.

I asked Brent if he had any tips for other aspiring entrepreneurs. "Do something that has significance," he replied, "something that makes a difference and that you have passion for. Second, successful entrepreneurs are the ones who follow through. As Winston Churchill said, 'Never, never, never, give up.' Third, don't set goals too high. Fourth, do it without raising lots of capital. Fifth, stay focused. Sixth, every quarter, make an operating plan, and stick to it.

Modern biomimicry is far more than just copying nature's shapes. It includes systematic design and problem-solving processes, which are now being refined by scientists and engineers in universities and institutes worldwide. The first step in any of these processes is to clearly define the challenge we're trying to solve. Then we can determine whether the problem is related to form, function, or ecosystem. Next, we ask what plant, animal, or natural process solves a similar problem most effectively. For example, engineers trying to design a camera lens with the widest viewing angle possible found inspiration in the eyes of bees, which can see an incredible five-sixths of the way, or three hundred degrees, around their heads. The process can also work in reverse, where the exceptional strategies of a plant, animal, or ecosystem are recognized and reverse engineered. De Mestral's study of the tenacious grip of burrs on his socks is an early example of reverse engineering a natural winner, while researchers' fascination at the way geckos can hang upside down from the ceiling or climb vertical windows has now resulted in innovative adhesives and bandages. Designs based on biomimicry offer a range of economic benefits. Because nature has carried out trillions of parallel, competitive experiments for millions of years, its successful designs are dramatically more energy efficient than the inventions we've created in the past couple of hundred years. Nature builds only with locally derived materials, so it uses little transport energy. Its designs can be less expensive to manufacture than traditional approaches, because nature doesn't waste materials. For example, the exciting new engineering frontier of nanotechnology mirrors nature's manufacturing principles by building devices one molecule at a time. This means no offcuts or excess. Nature can't afford to poison itself either, so it creates and combines chemicals in a way that is nontoxic to its ecosystems. Green chemistry is a branch of biomimicry that uses this do-no-harm principle, to develop everything from medicines to cleaning products to industrial molecules that are safe by design. Learning from the way nature handles materials also allows one of our companies, PaxFan, to build fans that are smaller and lighter while giving higher performance. Finally, nature has methods to recycle absolutely everything it creates. In natures' closed loop of survival on this planet, everything is a resource and everything is recycled-one of the most fundamental components of sustainability. For all these reasons, as I hear one prominent venture capitalist declare, biomimicry will be the business of the twenty-first century. The global force of this emerging and fascinating field is undeniable and building on all societal levels.

If indigenous peoples have a sense of "enough," what has happened with the rest of humanity? Many of us in the developed world have tamed and caged and bored ourselves. Like animals domesticated for use, we have become fat and unhealthy. With more than half of us living in urban areas, we've largely lost our connection to nature and the historic initiation rites that oriented us to our place in the cycle of life. Instead, we distract ourselves with everything from shopping to stimulants to video games.

Bio-inspired products often see annual doubling in sales when they enter the market. They offer customers better performance, reduced energy requirements, less waste, and less toxicity, while being sold at prices competitive with existing products.

More than 200 billion was invested in sustainable businesses worldwide in 2010-a 40 percent increase from 2009-even as many other sectors sagged in the worst recession in eighty years. Biomimicry is sometimes described as a discipline of sustainable engineering, but any truly sustainable product or business is inherently biomimetic. Biomimicry creates products based on nature's peak achievers-all of whom are sustainable.

Pharmaceuticals are essentially biomimetic in principle, but are not often designed to have no side effects. Drugs were historically created from natural substances; the word drug comes from the Dutch droog, meaning "dried plant." As evidenced in Neanderthal archaeological digs, natural medicines have been in use for more than sixty thousand years. Excavations have revealed the use of at least seven herbal remedies that still show proven therapeutic value, including ephedra (as a cold remedy), hollyhock (poor man's aspirin), and yarrow (wound dressing).

By constantly creating conditions conducive to life, with zero waste and a balanced use of resources, nature is clean, green, and sustainable. Following nature's design mastery, we can achieve greater wealth and economic sustainability.

Within just a few thousand years-a millisecond in evolutionary time-humans had developed much more complex tools, and the intellectual theories to support them. Newtonian physics, the industrial revolution, and the nineteenth century age of enlightenment spurred tremendous technological development and transformed our social mores. A consequence of this paradigm shift, however, was that humanity's view of the world changed from an organic to a mechanistic one. Early engineers saw the potential of breaking up any system into components and rearranging the parts. Innovations in machinery and materials led to mass production: making thousands and then millions of exactly the same forms out of flat metal plates and square building blocks. However, for all its positive impact on the economics and culture of the era, the industrial revolution's orientation was shortsighted. In the rush to understand the world as a clockwork mechanism of discrete components, nature's design genius was left behind-and with it the blueprints for natural, nontoxic, streamlined efficiency. A new set of values emerged, such that anything drawn from nature was dismissed as primitive in favor of human invention. Just as the pharmacology of the rain forests, known to indigenous people for millenia, has been largely lost to modern science, so too were the simple rules of natural design obfuscated. A our societies became more urban, we went from living and working in nature and being intimately connected with its systems, to viewing nature as a mere warehouse (some might say, whorehouse) of raw materials waiting to be plundered for industrial development.

As we'll see throughout this book, nature's problem-solving strategies offer immense opportunities for wealth creation in a new economy. Whether the shatter-resistant ceramics of an abalone shell, the superior drag resistance demonstrated by seaweeds, or the pure combustion of plant photosynthesis, impacted industries range from construction to transportation to medicine to software. Nature's paradigm does what human technology tries to do-and does it sustainably without stripping out the base resources that create wealth. So what's preventing us from more rapid adoption of bio-inspired design?

The cochlea of all mammals matches the spiraling design of a seashell, while the shape of our outer ears echoes the curled-up embryos of humans and many other animals-a feature utilized by acupuncturists who treat ailments in various body parts by pinning needles into the location on the ear that corresponds to those body parts.

Lift one hand in front of you now and inscribe a circle in the air with your finger, taking one second to complete it. As you're completing this process, the earth that you're sitting on is spinning on its axis and progressing radially with the rest of the solar system through space at the same time. Our earth travels through the solar system at 18.5 miles per second, and the entire solar system is barreling through space at 155 miles per second. So by the time your finger comes back to the starting place of your air circle, you will have arced more than 155 miles through space. Your circle looks like an expanded, uncoiling spring that is more than 155 miles long. In the same way, a brick falling from a tall building seems to travel in a straight line, but in the seconds that it takes to hit the ground, it has actually traced a long spiral relative to the universe. This applies to linear accelerators or anything traveling in what seems to be a totally straight or planar line. Incidentally, if a person is lost in a featureless desert, it has been found that he or she doesn't actually walk in circles as popularly thought. In reality, the meanderings follow spirals.

It's essential to do exhaustive due diligence and consult with specialized legal counsel before committing your technology to a VC contract. Interview management and staff at other companies in the VC firm's portfolio including some that failed. Research the history of how employees and other common stock holders fared as the companies grew. When in doubt, listen to your gut and speak up-and get any promises in writing.

The shell of the scaly foot possesses a number of additional energy-dissipation features compared to typical mollusk shells that are primarily composed of calcium carbonate." The industrial opportunities already anticipated include superior helmets, protective armor, and new structural materials. Pyrites and gregite are also cheap being evaluated as an alternative to silicone for the creation of cheap, abundant solar cells.

A spoon with a Lotus Effect surface can be dipped into honey and come out totally clean-without a hint of stickiness. As just one example, perhaps we could reduce the need for high water use and environmentally damaging detergents in dishwashers by keeping our plates and utensils cleaner to begin with.

When I bumped into Dr. Daniel Bedo, a boyhood friend who I hadn't seen for many years, I learned that he had become one of the world's foremost authorities on the chromosomes of blackflies. He had spent his career studying them. I asked him how there could possible be enough happening in a bunch of microscopic chromosomes to keep him fascinated. His response: "When you enter the world of a single chromosome, it's like you walked through the door to an entirely new and unique universe. The lessons nature has to teach us are infinite.

There are four hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide in earth's atmosphere, with billions more added each year due to human activities-and burning fossil fuels is not the only major source of humans' contribution. The release of carbon dioxide in the process of cement making for concrete is a leading source, because one ton of traditionally produced cement generates at least one ton of carbon dioxide. As concrete is the most traded material in the world after water, cement production has become the third largest contributor of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, at three billion tons per year.