Colin McEnroe Show: Will Jellyfish Revolutionize Engineering?

The youngest winner of one of this year's MacArthur "genius grants" was John Dabiri, a Caltech professor who studies the way jellyfish get around.

Dabiri describes his work as partly pure science and partly applied engineering.

It's just possible that with more than 500 million years of evolutionary tweaking under their bell margins, jellyfish may have figured out a few things that wouldn't pop up naturally on an engineer's drafting table. As an undergraduate, one of Nabiri's first thoughts was that the pulsation of a jellyfish closely resembled the human heart, so there might be applications for heart diagnostics and treatment.

But the shorter path from jellyfish to design improvements seems to be in such areas as wind energy and the development of underwater vehicles so efficient that they can stay underwater for a year using very little fuel.

Dabiri says he isn't entirely sure how he will use his $500,000 grant. But after years studying jellyfish in the lab, he hopes to finally join his graduate students and dive with them in the open sea.

There's just one catch - the Toledo native says he needs to learn how to swim first.

Later in the show, Chion Wolf joins Colin to read your mail and YPM comments.

Send us your thoughts and show ideas by e-mailing colin@wnpr.org or Tweeting @wnprcolin.