Magazine on biomimicry ZQ launches Spanish edition

It won prestigious awards and accolades from the UK and the U.S., and now ZQ—an online journal about biomimicry co-edited and designed by Marjan Eggermont—has launched a Spanish-language edition.

Eggermont, associate dean (student affairs) and senior instructor in mechanical and manufacturing engineering in the Schulich School of Engineering, launched ZQ two years ago with colleagues from San Francisco and Toronto to explore biomimicry—the science of looking to nature to solve complex human problems.

“It’s a very new field and there was a real gap in how to get information about it,” she says.  “It was either through very complicated, in-depth science papers in journals or just sort of pie in the sky stories in the media. There was nothing in between that really explained how this field works and how you can get great ideas from nature and get them to market.”

The journal aims to be accessible to students as well as experts. The most recent edition of ZQ, its eighth, explores how the bumps on a shark’s back increase its thrust and what that has to do with Olympian Michael Phelp’s Speedo, as well as looking at a few of the 100 trillion microbes that live on the human body, specifically the bacteria growing in our belly buttons.

Contributors to the journal have backgrounds in art, design, architecture, science and engineering. “The range is enormous,” says Eggermont, who along with faculty in medicine, EVDS and science teach biomimicry in various classes on campus.

The Spanish edition of ZQ was launched after Mexican colleagues received funding from Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, Departamento de Arquitectura to translate the journal into Spanish. It had 1,000 readers by the end of the week.

The English version has about 40,000 readers around the world, and a French-language edition may be next.  “I have an offer from someone in France to have it translated into French. I don’t have a budget but if they want to do it, I am happy to design the magazine to accommodate,” says Eggermont.

The journal has been nominated twice for a digital science magazine award and Eggermont has won an award from Biomimicry 3.8. But over and above the formal recognition, she enjoys hearing from ZQ’s readers. “I get emails from the strangest places, from Turkey to Barcelona and China to France. I love the fact that it’s worldwide and people are somehow finding it.”

Eggermont says the field is growing—she just helped launch Biomimicry Alberta with other academics as well as people from industry and the community and a campus-wide student chapter is starting this semester. She’s happy to do what she can to add to the knowledge of biomimicry.

“I am doing this because I love the subject and the potential,” she says. “And I love teaching people about it.”