I love when trends come together, prompting innovations that make the world a better place. Frankly, this observation helps me recover my optimism after the news of the day invokes discouragement. Three trends – crowd sourcing, greater entrepreneurship within academic scientific communities and scarcity of natural resources – have come together to create asknature.org. The website is an open source search engine of all of biology, organized by the functions that living things accomplish.  At maturity, it will be a searchable on-line encyclopedia explaining how each living organism biologists have studied operates, organized by terms that describe what functions or problems an innovator/entrepreneur hopes to address. Asknature’s goal, according to the website, “is to connect innovative minds with life’s best ideas, and in the process, inspire technologies that create conditions conducive to life. To accomplish this, we’re doing something that has never been…