Mimic Makers: Biomimicry Inventors Inspired by Nature
A Bullet Train with a Beak
Whoooosh Here comes the Shinkansen bullet train a locomotive with a nose like a bird beak Its sleek shape makes it quiet fast and energy efficient But it wasn’t always a two-hundred-mile-per-hour silver streak At first every time the train traveled through a tunnel it blasted out the other end with a boom that could be heard for miles around That all changed when a bird-watcher’s ideas took flight
NAKATSU EIJI watched a kingfisher plunge like an arrow into the water below How did this daring diver hit the surface with hardly a ripple Eiji discovered that the kingfisher’s pointed beak cuts smoothly through air and water
Eiji brought this idea to work where he was trying to redesign the Shinkansen He shaped the nose of the train like the kingfisher’s bill This design streamlined the booming train into a quiet ride that flies faster and uses less energy
