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February 14 2011
Walk Like an Egyptian: With Prosthetic Toes
One Egyptologist isn’t ready to close the book on the tale of two toes. Once thought to be mere ornamentation for the afterlife, the artificial toes found on two ancient Egyptian mummies may actually be the earliest known prosthetic limbs.
The fake toes in question are the Greville Chester and Tabaketenmut toes. The Greville toe dates to before 600 BC and is made of cartonnage (similar to papier mâché); the Tabaketenmut toe could date as far back as 710 BC and is made mostly of wood, though researchers believe it also contains leather, and it even has a hinge for flexibility.
Jacky Finch, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, UK, had a hunch that these artificial toes weren’t just for looks. Not only were the toes rigorously correct in their anatomy, but they also showed signs of wear and tear–which prompted an experiment that has been over 2,000 years in the making.
Finch created two false toes–one modeled on the Greville digit and one on the Tabaketenmut–and had two big-toe-deficient volunteers use the artificial toes as prosthetic limbs. She recorded the pressure made by the volunteers’ ...
February 07 2011
To Build Better Shock Absorbers, Study the Woodpecker’s Bash-Proof Brain
Have you ever wondered why woodpeckers don’t pass out after scrounging a meal from a tree? Their little brains, after all, undergo decelerations of 1200g as they bang their beaks against the wood–over ten times the force needed to give a human a concussion. Now scientists are learning how to harness the woodpecker’s special abilities not to prevent headaches, but to safeguard our gadgets.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed CT scans and video footage of the golden-fronted woodpecker (Melanerpes aurifons) to design better shock absorbers. They found that woodpeckers have four traits that ease their noggins: fluid between the skull and brain, a beak that is slightly elastic, a section of soft skull bone, and a bone called the hyoid, or lingual bone, which is also somewhat elastic.
The scientists then constructed a woodpecker-inspired shock-absorbing system around a circuit using materials that approximated the bird’s four absorbers. For example, rubber represented the supportive and slightly-elastic nature of the hyoid bone, while aluminum mimicked the brain-skull fluid. With the circuit securely surrounded, they stuffed it inside a bullet and fired the bullet at an aluminum wall ...
December 14 2010
Video: Watch a Sprinting Robot Fall Down
In pursuit of a glorious future in which robots can outrun humans (what could possibly go wrong?), researcher Ryuma Niiyama has unveiled Athlete, a bot that’s intended to sprint.
The bipedal robot’s upper legs are modeled on the human musculoskeletal system, while the lower legs are fashioned from the spring-like blades that amputee runners use (and use so effectively that some have called the blades an unfair advantage).
Erico Guizzo of IEEE Spectrum explains:
Each leg has seven sets of artificial muscles. The sets, each with one to six pneumatic actuators, correspond to muscles in the human body — gluteus maximus, adductor, hamstring, and so forth…. The researchers are now teaching Athlete to run. They programmed the robot to activate its artificial muscles with the same timing and pattern of a person’s muscles during running.
Niiyama described his bot at the IEEE conference on humanoid robots last week, and has published a paper (pdf) on the project in the journal Industrial Robot. The challenge is to get all those artificial muscles working in sequence as the bot bounds across the landscape.
It’s a big challenge. So far, Athlete can take only three to five steps before tumbling to the ground. Still that’s pretty impressive compared to a hopping prototype from 2007 (seen in the video below), which took one great leap for robotics and promptly fell down. Humans, maybe you don’t need to run for your lives just yet.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Brain Surgery Enables Woman to Run 100-Mile Races
80beats: Ostriches Are Endurance Runners, Thanks to the Spring in Their Steps
80beats: Running by the Books: Math for the Marathoner
80beats: No Shoes, No Problem? Barefoot Runners Put Far Less Stress on Their Feet
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Are a Sprinter’s Prostethic Legs an Unfair Advantage?
Video: Ryuma Niiyama
November 24 2010
Geckos Always Land on Their Feet—and So Does This Gecko-Bot
The gecko robot just keeps getting better. Not only can the robot climb up walls like the sticky-toed lizard, but it can automatically right itself while falling.
Geckos, like cats and buttered toast, can naturally turn themselves around in midair. Cats are able to right themselves because they are flexible and can twist their bodies around. The gecko, on the other hand, uses its large tail’s inertia to twist its body around to the correct orientation, explains Cosmic Log:
Within about a tenth of a second, the geckos flipped their tails around to induce body rotation. Then they spread out their tails as well as their feet into a “belly-down skydiving posture” position to stabilize the fall. All of the geckos that used their tails in this way landed on their feet, even in wind-tunnel tests–while none of the tailless geckos could do the same trick.
Hit the jump for a video of the gecko-bot in action.
After studying the gecko’s movements, robotics engineers at UC Berkeley were able to create a robot that could do the same tricks. They used the “stickybot” gecko robot designed by Sangbae Kim at Stanford University, which has sticky feet that allow it to climb up walls. They modified the tail so it could swing around and create inertia, successfully righting the robot as it fell.
The researchers published their findings in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. Check out the video below for high-speed footage of the gecko free-falling, and a brief demonstration of the gecko-bot in action:
But what if you buttered the back of the gecko?
Related Content:
80beats: Scientists Make a Super-Strong Nanotech Glue Modeled on Gecko Feet
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Swimming, walking salamander robot reconstructs invasion of land
Not Exactly Rocket Science: The dance of the disembodied gecko tail
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Geckos use their tails to stop falls and manoeuvre in the air
DISCOVER: 3 Robots That Move Just Like Animals
DISCOVER: Oh, to Climb Like a Gecko!
Image: Flickr/Joslynan Video: UC Berkeley/Ardian Jusufi et al.
November 23 2010
To Find Love, the Barnacle Grows a Stretchy, Accordion-Like Penis
To find a mate, most animals must travel—up a tree, down a stream, across the street to the bar. But not barnacles, which spend their entire adult lives cemented firmly to rocks, boats, whales and the like. To compensate for their immobility, barnacles have evolved the longest penises relative to body size in the animal kingdom.
The appendages can reach up to ten times the length of the barnacles’ bodies to allow them to search of a partner. See a video—safe for work!—below.
According to new research published in Marine Biology, the shape of barnacles’ penises varies depending on their circumstances. Barnacles spaced far apart from each other develop stretchier organs, the better for reaching across the gaps, and barnacles exposed to rough waves grow wider ones to stand up against the tide.
Study author Matthew Hoch took advantage of the fact that barnacles grow new penises every mating season (a good thing, since the genitalia sometimes break off in the waves). In July 2005, before their reproductive tissues developed for the year, Hoch identified populations of acorn barnacles at five sites in Long Island Sound, and selectively removed barnacles so that some were densely crowded together, and others had space between them. Then, just before the barnacles’ mating season began in mid-November, he collected organisms from each plot and dissected and analyzed their fresh-grown penises.
Though overall length didn’t change, Hoch found that sparsely arranged barnacles grew penises with more annulations–ringed folds that allow them to stretch farther, like an accordion or a bendy straw. Barnacles living right next to each other developed fewer folds. Though it’s unclear exactly how they sense it, other barnacles’ proximity seems to dictate what kind of genitals they grow.
“Barnacles must perceive something related to the density of crowding and physical contact with neighbors as a cue for estimating the distance over which the penis must reach,” Hoch writes. “Increasing the number of annulations of the penis most likely allows these mating barnacles to reach more distant neighbors.”
In addition, when he compared barnacles from sheltered harbor sites to those exposed to rough Atlantic waves, Hoch found that average penis diameter increased with wave strength. The thicker shape must provide structural support and reduce the risk of breakage in choppier waters, he concludes.
The farther the penis meanders, the greater the potential for wave damage, so penis morphology probably comes down to risk versus reward, Hoch writes. If there are potential mates close by, it’s not worth the extra energy it takes to grow a stretchy penis and the extra risk it takes to use it. But if the only other barnacles around are distant, the investment could pay off with a chance to reproduce.
Lesson for life? Perhaps. But for now we’re probably better off leaving the house.
Related Content:
Discoblog: And the Prize for World’s Largest Testicles Goes to… the Bushcricket!
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Ballistic Penises and Corkscrew Vaginas — The Sexual Battles of Ducks
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Horrific Beetle Sex – Why the Most Successful Males Have the Spikiest Penises
80beats: Scientists Make Rabbit Penis Replacement Parts; Male Rabbits Rejoice
Video: Vimeo / Casey Dunn
October 22 2010
Video: The Physics of How a Wet Dog Shakes
“Many furry mammals engage in oscillatory shaking when wet.” Translation: When a dog comes in from the rain, it engages in a body-twisting, jowl-flapping shake that sprays water over the living room. But exactly what kinds of oscillations are required to make the water droplets scatter? Thankfully a team of curious researchers decided to study the physics of that motion.
In the abstract posted on ArXiv, Andrew Dickerson of the Georgia Institute of Technology and some colleagues explain that they attacked the question via high-speed video and fur-particle tracking:
As you can see from the data in the video, the research raises further questions. Their mathmathical model is based on the idea that surface tension holds the water droplets to the animal’s hair, and that centripetal forces from the shaking have to exceed that surface tension in order to free the water. This implies that smaller animals (or as they might say, animals with a smaller radius) have to shake faster in order to get dry, a prediction borne out by observations of everything from mice to bears. But when the researchers plotted the data on a graph, it didn’t quite conform to their predictions.
Technology Review, where we first saw this story, explains where they may have gone wrong:
Clearly, their model misses some important correction factor. Dickerson and co make one suggestion. In their model, the radius is the distance from the centre of the animal to its skin. Perhaps the fur makes a difference, they say.
The video helpfully declares that no animals were harmed in its making; they were just somewhat dampened.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Researchers Watch Three-Legged Dogs Run for the Sake of Robotics
80beats: Why a Greyhound or a Racehorse Doesn’t “Pop a Wheelie”
80beats: Study: A “Pessimistic” Dog Is More Likely to Destroy Your Slippers
80beats: Caught on Film: Raindrop Forms Parachute, Explodes Into Motley Smaller Drops
Video: Andrew Dickerson et al.
July 26 2010
Study: Belly-Flopping Frogs Evolved Big Jumps Before Smooth Landings
Apparently it’s hard to teach an old frog a new trick: landing on its legs. As painfully demonstrated in the video below, the primitive frog family Leiopelmatidae prefers to belly-flop.
In a study soon to appear in the journal Naturwissenschaften, Southern Illinois University’s Richard Essner Jr. and his team compared, via high-speed video, five frog species’ jumping techniques: three “primitive” frogs and two “modern” frogs (so named because they evolved more recently than the “primitive” species). Though all the frogs started their jumps similarly, the primitive frogs kept their legs extended when they land–keeping their Superman pose to the skidding end.
The researchers believe the frog jump may have evolved in two steps: first the shared leg starting position and then the mid-flight leg repositioning, which the primitive frogs lack. They think the apparently more modern landings may offer an evolutionary advantage, as it allows frogs to quickly execute another jump–a nice advantage when looking for food or escaping an enemy.
But evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory proposes a potential alternative interpretation: Given that the primitive frogs also have a different swimming style, is the belly-flop really more “primitive,” or did it emerge along with other traits adapted for the frogs’ fast-running stream habitat?
Old or new, the belly-flopping frogs come equipped with their own gut protection: “shield-shaped” pelvic cartilage and abdominal ribs which researchers believe may soften the blow.
For more, check out Ed Yong’s post on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Related content:
Discoblog: Video: How Male Frogs Kick up a Frog Froth to Protect Their Young
Discoblog: Endangered Frogs Encouraged to Get Amorous in an Amphibian “Love Shack”
Discoblog: Frogs Pee Away Scientists’ Attempt to Study Them
Discoblog: It’s Raining Tadpoles? Fish, Frogs Shower Japanese Residents
Video: Video by Essner; soundtrack by Ed Yong.
July 01 2010
Researchers Watch Three-Legged Dogs Run for the Sake of Robotics
After a presentation on “hydraulic leg extension” in large spiders and another on “aspects of octopedal locomotion,” researchers attending today’s Society for Experimental Biology annual meeting learned how to run like a three-legged dog.
Martin Gross of the University of Jena in Germany presented a project that could one day teach disabled planet-exploring robots how to keep trekking or damaged military robots how to survive the battlefield. Watching how his brother’s dog adapted to losing a leg, Gross was impressed with both the dog’s coping methods, and speed.
“The one with only three legs is still the fastest of all his dogs,” Gross told the BBC.
A contributor to the European LOCOMORPH project, which studies robot movements, Gross hoped to learn how to improve robot motion from these injured, but far from disabled dogs. After getting the dogs (some with a missing hind leg and some a missing front leg) to wear a series of reflective tags, Gross recorded their movements as they walked and ran using ten high-speed infrared cameras. (Head to the BBC to check out the video.)
As reported in Scientific American, Gross’s team analyzed the data from the tags’ motions to get a closer look at the canines’ remastered coordination. Among other things, they found that the dogs’ coped more easily with hind leg loss–since the their front legs bear most of their weight.
The dog research may soon benefit robots–as the BBC reports, Gross has already made some small, four-legged robots to test. Given recent but unrelated advancements with animal prosthetics, it looks like other researchers might also soon help the dogs.
Related content:
Discoblog: Meet Oscar, the Bionic Cat
80beats: Meet the First Robot That Can Walk on Sand (and Maybe Sandy Planets)
80beats: Slithering Snakes Reveal the Secret of Limbless Locomotion
DISCOVER: The Biomechanics of . . . Cockroaches
Image: flickr / TheGiantVermin
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