Making a Shinkansen train run faster wasn't a great challenge; making it run more quietly was. The "claps" created by the train entering tunnels (caused by a sudden change in air resistance) were so loud that residents 400 metres away would complain.
Engineer Eiji Nakatsu noticed that kingfishers were able to dive smoothly from air (a low-resistance medium) into water (a high-resistance medium), and wondered if this was due to the bird's streamlined beak. Computer simulations proved him right. "Data analysis showed that the ideal nose shape is almost identical to the kingfisher's beak," he says. The new shape has also cut the train's energy use by 15 per cent, and increased its speed by ten per cent.
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