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December 05 2011
Impostor Silverfish Rub up on Adolescent Ants to Create Their Smelly Disguises
This silverfish didn’t fool the army ants. But many do.
The silverfish Malayatelura ponerophila is a kleptomaniac parasite that lives amongst the fierce army ants of southeast Asia, hanging out in the insect’s mobile colonies and living off the food they bring home. But how does it survive as a full-time impostor?
A study just accepted for publication in the journal BMC Evolution shows that these furtive freeloaders avoid detection by rubbing themselves all over immature ants called callows, “adolescent” ants which recently emerged from their larval stage. This gives the silverfish a coating of chemicals, called cuticular hydrocarbons (or CHCs), that the near-blind ants use to recognize nestmates in the dark. It is a dangerous way to live; army ants have keen senses and are usually adept at recognizing intruders, even expelling or killing fellow Leptogenys distinguenda if they smell like they’re from a different colony.
In the study, the researchers first catalogued all the cuticular hydrocarbons used by the ants, finding 70 in all. Doing the same for the silverfish, they found it made none of its own. They then coated the immature ants in a radio-labeled hydrocarbon similar in structure to others CHCs. They found that ...
July 14 2011
Mouth Robot Croaks a Nursery Rhyme, Provokes Nightmares
Several years ago, researchers in (you guessed it) Japan put together a reasonable facsimile of the human vocal apparatus in an attempt to help hearing-impairing people learn to better modulate their voices. The details of how this process works can be perused here, but we’d just like to treat you to a trailer of this creepy little puppy in action, moaning the nursery rhyme “Kagome, Kagome,” before some major film studio options it for a B-grade horror flick. Titles, anyone?
(via PopSci)
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.
June 01 2010
How Butterfly Wing Patterns Could Thwart Counterfeiting Crooks
These researchers want to take their butterflies to the bank. They’ve found a way to mimic the nanostructures responsible for giving butterfly wings their colors, and they think butterfly-inspired money designs might hinder counterfeiters.
“We still need to refine our system, but in future we could see structures based on butterflies wings shining from a £10 note or even our passports,” said Mathias Kolle in a university press release. Kolle researched the butterfly’s wing structure with Ullrich Steiner and Jeremy Baumberg at the University of Cambridge.
Butterfly wings don’t use traditional pigment for their flair. Instead, they rely on the way light bounces off tiny multilayer structures on their wings. These micro- and nanostructures come in a variety of shapes (see the “egg carton-like” scanning electron microscope picture below), and scientists have long had inklings as to how different structures result in different colors. But Kolle and colleagues have gone one step further, managing the elusive task of copying this craft.
They studied the swallowtail butterfly (Papilio blumei), and rebuilt the butterfly’s stunning molecular-scaled wing structures. Nature Nanotechnology recently published their findings and a description of their techniques.
Not using pigment may be a way to keep butterflies safe, as the color reflecting from those tiny structures appears differently to different viewers, perhaps camouflage green to predators, but bright blue to mates.
Adopting their techniques could also protect money, if researchers figure out ways to use their wing-mimicing structures to encrypt information in optical signatures. And that means that copying currency would produce a lot more butterflies in counterfeiters’ stomachs.
Related content:
Discoblog: Video: The Delicate Flutter of Robotic Butterfly Wings
Discoblog: A Butterfly’s Moustache Leads Scientists to a New Species
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Parasitic wasps hitchhike on butterflies by smelling for chemical chastity belts
80beats: A Near-Extinct Blue Butterfly Flourishes Again, Thanks to a Red Ant
DISCOVER: The Calculating Beauty of Butterflies (photo gallery)
Images: Mathias Kolle, University of Cambridge
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