Introducing Feral by Design: Solving Human Problems with Nature

Goats are being hired to reduce wildfire and bushfire fuel, and in NSW the Rural Fire Service has even dubbed its hazard-reduction herds the “Goat Brigade”. But this story starts with one goat, one sheep and an impossible backyard on Sydney Harbour. Helen and Will Martin were living at HMAS Watson when the lawnmower essentially admitted defeat. The yard was steep, wildly overgrown and, as Helen put it, “goat country”. So Nelson the goat and Jed the sheep moved in. Which sounds ridiculous. Unt...

What happens when you give someone a way of looking, without telling them what to find? Pia takes one small part of her octopus-inspired innovation method out of the office and sends it on holiday to Zimbabwe with her friend Jane. The experiment starts at Eastgate Centre in Harare, the termite-inspired building from the previous episode. Jane gets one loose lens: How does this place feel? What can you hear? What do you notice? What surprises you? Then Pia gets out of the way. What begins as a...

Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, is one of biomimicry’s most famous buildings. Designed by architect Mick Pearce and inspired by termite mounds, its passive cooling system uses around 90% less energy for heating and cooling than comparable conventionally air-conditioned buildings. Thirty years later, Feral went inside. Our first roving correspondent, Jane, went into Eastgate to find out what this famous piece of termite-inspired architecture actually feels like today, how its passive cool...

Last week, we looked at the biology behind GLP-1 medicines like Ozempic and Wegovy. This revisited Season 1 episode looks at the other half of that moment: the needle itself. Mosquito mouthparts have inspired researchers and designers working on less painful needle technology, microneedles and medical devices. Their six-part feeding system works very differently from a conventional needle, using multiple tiny structures together rather than one blunt puncture. When you were a kid, did you eve...

What does Ozempic have to do with a venomous desert lizard that spends most of its life underground? This story starts at 3am with a unicorn saying the word chocolate fifteen times, and ends with the Gila monster, GLP-1, Ozempic, Wegovy and one tiny molecular difference that helped change modern medicine. Our bodies already make GLP-1. It works beautifully, then disappears in minutes. The Gila monster carries a remarkably similar molecule called exendin-4, except nature built this one differe...