Copying Nature

Scientists look to sunflowers to design more efficient concentrated solar power plants:

Mitsos and colleague Corey Noone used numerical optimization to fiddle with the placement of the heliostats. They brought the fanned-out layout closer together, building a spiral-like pattern that reduces land by ten percent without affecting efficiency.
Next they looked to nature to improve the design further. The florets of a sunflower — small flowers at the center of the petals, which mature into seeds — are arranged in a stunning spiral fashion that’s impressed mathematicians for years.
The arrangement — a form of Fermat spiral — has each floret turned at a “golden angle” – about 137 degrees – with respect to its neighbor.
The researchers twisted each mirror to be 137 degrees relative to its neighbor and it made a huge difference. The optimized layout takes up 20 percent less space than the current layout of the PS10 in Spain, and even increased total efficiency.

There's a lot of valuable information in nature.  We probably ought to pay more attention than we do.