Like scientists, engineers increasingly are taking advantage of a pre-existing blueprint that can be a great key to unlocking inspiration for their profession’s endeavors. This roadmap surrounds us all: nature.

Creative people looking to nature for inspiration is not a new concept: writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are considered literary classics because they did it. For engineers and scientists, examining and emulating nature is just as seasoned a concept.

Looking back through history, there are plenty of examples of nature-inspired designs, such as those flying machines, or Velcro — the fabric fastener invented by Swiss engineer George De Mestral in 1948 was inspired by clingy cocklebur seeds. Barbed wire was modeled after the thorny Osage orange tree.

However, it wasn’t until recently, in the last 30 years, nature-inspired designs garnered notable attention and, it could be argued, instated a truly radical change in engineering and science. In fact, such observations have become the foundation of an increasingly popular scientific field.

Aerospace engineer Theodore Von Karman perhaps said it best: Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was. Science is about discovering the natural. Engineering is applying math and science to create the artificial.

“Anytime a new research field emerges, it takes a while to put the basic building blocks together. It’s just a matter of time. We’re getting there,” said S.K. Gupta, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Maryland who teaches a bio-inspired robotics course, in recent Associated Press reportage.

Of note, this spring, biologists and engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology pulled off the first conference dedicated to bio-inspired design research in an array of disciplines, Slate (slideshow) reports just this morning.

Claus Mattheck of the Karlsruhe Research Center in Germany, for one, is helping to develop stronger bridges and supports by examining how tree trunks cope with massive loads overhead. He is one of many.

Recently, the world has seen a few popular successes, including cleaning products and paints that capture how some plants prevent water from sticking to leafy surfaces, effectively repelling dirt and contaminants.

IMT recently reported that General Electric (GE) researchers are looking at how the lotus plant self-cleans to produce everything from easy-to-clean building materials and cheap diagnostic devices with plastic microfluidic channels to self-cleaning cars and a ketchup bottle whose contents flow freely.

Meanwhile, Ken Sandhage, an engineer by training who studies materials at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has bred diatoms — single-celled algae with hard, silica-based shells — to apply to engineering problems. He grew a range of different types, each with a distinctive skeletal shape and each one-quarter the width of a human hair.

“Every species is capable of making a silicon cell wall with patterned features that are amazingly intricate — fine pores, ridges and channels,” he told AP. “From an engineering perspective, that’s spectacular.”

Explains AP:

Diatoms are versatile as industrial building blocks because they can transform into a wide range of shapes. Sandhage envisions using barium titanate diatoms because they glow when doped with the element europium. Nesting such diatoms together could result in brighter LCD screens. Production, he said, would be relatively cheap, because the organisms take care of most of the precision work themselves.

Sandhage’s initial introduction to diatoms gleaned an immediate reaction: the possibility of modeling nano-devices after the tiny algae.

There’s also Anita Roth-Nebelsick, who studies materials at the University of T