I'm always interested in the ideas of technologies that are inspired by nature - and not just one feature or item, but by technologies that take on ecological principles to better interact with their environment and look to sustainability. With that in mind, I was reading about some new technologies around the corner... (all from Economist issue June 12th-18th 2010)

The huge news of the creation of the world's first truly artificial life-form is currently creating lots of news and comment - as you might expect:

There is a considerable amount of internal competition in biology. By this I mean that internal to an organism, it can compete within its self to produce the best 'goods'. So for example some plants will abort the growth of fruit where it does not have enough seeds. One could see this as a form of internal-competition between possible fruits so that only the fittest has the resources to grow it to full term, is used.

There is an interesting post on the blog Why Evolution in True - interesting because it points to an interesting idea for those of us looking to biology for tools in other realms (such as media in my case aka media ecology).  First here is a quote from the post;