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After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds

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问题     After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to the dog’s fur. Under a microscope, he looked closely at the hook-and-loop system that the seeds have evolved to hitchhike on passing animals and aid pollination, and he realised that the same approach could be used to join other things together. The result was Velcro: a product that was arguably more than three billion years in the making, since that is how long the natural mechanism that inspired it took to evolve.
    Velcro is probably the most famous and certainly the most successful example of biological mimicry, or "biomimetics". In fields from robotics to materials science, technologists are increasingly borrowing ideas from nature, and with good reason: nature’s designs have, by definition, stood the test of time, so it would be foolish to ignore them. Yet transplanting natural designs into man-made technologies is still a hit-or-miss affair.
    Engineers depend on biologists to discover interesting mechanisms for them to exploit, says Julian Vincent, the director of the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies at the University of Bath in England. So he and his colleagues have been working on a scheme to enable engineers to bypass the biologists and tap into nature’s ingenuity directly, via a database of "biological patents". The idea is that this database will let anyone search through a wide range of biological mechanisms and properties to find natural solutions to technological problems.
    Surely human intellect, and the deliberate application of design knowledge, can devise better mechanisms than the mindless, random process of evolution. Far from it. Over billions of years of trial and error, nature has devised effective solutions to all sorts of complicated real-world problems. Take the slippery task of controlling a submersible vehicle, for example. Using propellers, it is incredibly difficult to make refined movements. But Nekton Research, a company based in Durham, North Carolina, has developed a robot fish called Madeleine that manoeuvres using fins instead.
    In some cases, engineers can spend decades inventing and perfecting a new technology, only to discover that nature beat them to it. The Venus flower basket, for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge, has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are remarkably similar, both in appearance and optical properties, to commercial optical fibres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Lucent Technology’s Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. And sometimes the systems found in nature can make even the most advanced technologies look primitive by comparison, she says.
Julian Vincent and his colleagues have set up a database of "biological patents" so that
选项 A、biologists can access nature’s ingenuity
B、anyone can access nature’s ingenuity
C、natural problems can be solved with technological solutions
D、anyone can patent biological mechanisms
答案B
解析 属细节推断题。根据题干定位到原文第三段第二句：Julian Vincent和他的同事们正在从事一个项目，通过“生物专利”数据库，工程师们不需借助生物学家的帮助，就能直接对大自然巧妙的设计进行研究。这样做的目的是使任何人都能通过数据库对生物的机制和特点进行全面地探索，从而从自然中找到办法来解决技术问题。题目问的是目的，所以正确答案为B。A项是事实，但答非所问。C项与原文不符，原文是用自然的办法解决技术问题。D项原文没有提到。
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