5 Advanced Technologies Still Catching Up to Invertebrates
There's a scientific field called biomimetics that is all about studying nature and stealing its technology. That makes sense -- if you want to build a flying machine, you start by looking at birds. But the more we study, the more we find that biomimetics isn't just about building a more fishlike boat. Even the smallest, slimiest creatures employ tech that will some day revolutionize everything from solar panels to TV screens.
Just consider the fact that ...
#5.
The Bombardier Beetle's Fuel-Injection System Beats Any Car's
The bombardier beetle is one badass motherfucker. If you mess with one of these beetles, you can expect to get sprayed with a 212-degree blast of burning, noxious chemicals from a turret on the end of its abdomen. It's like a little chemical warfare tank that will go off with just the slightest bit of provocation.
Via Apologeticspress.org
"Oh, shit. Honey, I swear this never happens."
If you think it's amazing that a lowly bug evolved to do that, it's even more remarkable when you consider the complexity of the mechanism that makes it happen. Inside, it has two different chemicals and a mixing chamber. The chemicals react and get so hot that pressure builds in the chamber, which is then released through the openings on the beetle's abdomen. It can squirt the burning jet up to 20 centimeters.
Via Gotweird.com
"Shit! Did I get it in your hair? I promise I wasn't trying to do that."
Lots of animals squirt poison. The bombardier beetle, however, shoots quick-fire pulses like a machine gun -- one that can fire up to 500 times a second. For the sake of context, a top-of-the-line minigun on its fastest setting will fire about 100 times a second. The beetle is able to do all of this thanks to a remarkable system of internal valves that are way more efficient than what us humans have been able to build.
How We Can Steal It:
Keep in mind, all sorts of technology requires the misting and mixing of chemicals -- everything from car fuel-injection systems to the nebulizers that asthma sufferers use. Come up with a better misting system and you can change the world.
That's why researchers took the bombardier beetle's design and used it as the model for uMist. It's here that we should point out that, in order to mimic what the beetle is born with, it takes a machine that freaking looks like this:
Via As you can see, mimicking the beetle's tech isn't easy. But it'll be worth it -- the beetle design allows us to control the temperature, velocity and size of the droplets being sprayed, which means the potential applications are nearly endless. We're talking about better fuel efficiency and lower emissions in vehicles and a new type of gas-turbine aircraft engine that can reignite in mid-flight if it loses power. Oh, and get this: the technology could even create needle-free injections, or as all the Trekkies out there would call them, hyposprays.
That's right. The bombardier beetle doesn't just hold the key to advanced aeronautic systems; it could also give us Star Trek medical technology.
Via Sweedishbiomimetics.com
"Of course I still respect you. Yes, I'll call you tomorrow."
#4.
The Sea Mouse's Fur Is Made of Super-Efficient Fiber-Optic Cables
The sea mouse's scientific name is Aphrodita aculeata, after the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. Not because it's a lovable creature, but because if you look at it from the underside it supposedly looks like a vagina.
Via The Featured Creature
The scientist that named this animal has obviously NEVER seen an actual vagina.
No, we don't know why they call it a mouse when it's clearly a worm. That's not important. What is important is that the sides of the sea mouse are covered in thin hairs, called setae, that will glow red, blue or green depending on how the light hits them.
Via BBC News
That's cool and all, but it's not until you get them under a microscope that you realize what a mind-blowing job evolution does of beating even our most state-of-the-art technology.
How We Can Steal It:
You probably know that the fastest communication cables are the fiber-optic lines that zip light along a series of thin, perfectly clear glass hairs. The tech took 170 years to perfect, and manufacturing fiber-optic cables is so complicated it would take the rest of this article to explain it.
Via Wikipedia
Well, yeah, of course we make it like that.
But the little clear hairs that grow on the back of that tiny sea worm thing? They're much, much more efficient than the cables we're using. All fiber-optic cables (and in fact, all cables of any kind) lose some of their signal over a distance. Fiber optics work by controlling the reflection of the light so that it bounces perfectly along the length of the cable, but the world is an imperfect place, and no medium we've come up with doesn't lose at least a little bit of the light over distances. No surface is perfectly reflective, after all.
But the sea mouse comes pretty freaking close. Its survival depends on its ability to light up its coat -- that's how it wards off predators. And its coat won't light up without exterior light hitting it. And it lives thousands of feet under the surface of the ocean, where virtually no light can reach. Therefore, millions of years of not wanting to die has allowed it to evolve spines that are nearly 100 percent efficient in their ability to reflect light.
Via Phys.ntnu.no
Scientists are examining the mouse, not just so that we can steal the design of its super-efficient photonic fur, but so we can learn to actually "grow" the stuff the same way the mouse does. We're not sure why they can't just shave a bunch of the mice and glue the hairs together end to end, but they probably know what they're doing.
#3.
The Blue Morpho Butterfly Does Color Better Than Your LED TV
When you hear the word "butterfly," most of you probably think of words like "graceful," "beautiful" or, if you're a fan of chaos theory, "hurricane." But if you happen to work for Qualcomm, then you're probably thinking about energy-efficient display screens right now.
Via Wikipedia
"Turn it to the right and see if it gets the Bears game."
The first thing you notice about the Blue Morpho is that it seems to have given itself the gaudy iridescent paint job of a customized Honda Civic.
Via How it achieves that color is kind of amazing. Normally, color works like this: The surface of whatever you're looking at reflects light of a certain color and absorbs all of the other colors. For instance, plants are green because the pigment absorbs all of the colors of the spectrum except green. Green is reflected back, so the plant looks green to you.
The butterfly, however, achieves its holy-shit-what-is-going-on-am-I-on-LSD-question-mark iridescent color because its wings are covered in layers of semireflective scales. Their "color" is determined by the wavelengths of light interfering with each other. So, the brilliant blue is actually every color in the spectrum being reflected in a particular way so that blue is amplified. The result is a blue that makes all of the other blues you've seen in your life look like bullshit.
Via Wikipedia
Of course, you're seeing this on a monitor, so there's that catch-22.
How We Can Steal It:
Qualcomm studied the butterflies and came up with the mirasol display for televisions, which are so energy efficient that you can't help but suspect witchcraft. They mimic the butterfly with two reflective layers with a very small space in between. The top layer reflects some light and lets the rest through to be reflected by the bottom layer. Adjust the distance between layers by microscopic amounts and you can produce mind-blowing colors using just the ambient light in the room.
Obviously, since they don't have to produce their own light, the displays are massively more efficient than the screen you're looking at now (in fact, if the image on the screen is static, almost zero energy is used). And, by the way, it gives you a much more vivid image to boot.
I absolutely love evolution!!! The universe is filled with mysteries, it just makes it more interesting.
ReplyWhy is everything always chalked up to evolution. Rationally and scientifically Intelligent Design would make much more sense. The fact that so many creatures all over the earth work perfectly and much better than we can replicate is more than just evolution.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesWhy is it so hard to believe? After millions of years of slowly refining would produce designs infinitely better than anything we have tried for a few centuries.
No dont be stupid it was because of the AllSpark.
It's the other way around actually. Take the moth, for example. Just to create the eye one would have to make thousands of design decisions (like 0 or 1 in a code). Now look at the whole moth. How many decisions would one have to make to create such a simple creature? Now count all the bugs in the world and multiply that by the numbers of decisions you've come up with. Don't forget that you have to take into account everything previously created to make sure it all fits. And that's just the bugs. All that in what? 7 days? You must be tripping.
where do NEW species come from? protip: not old ones. what did the duck billed platypus evolve from? a beaver that humped a duck, that humped a scorpion?
shave the sea mice!
ReplySounds like a new and terrible charity.
The only way I would accept intelligent design is if the opposing party is willing to accept that a lot of alcohol and drugs were clearly involved at the time of creation. Otherwise, evolution better explains all the inefficiencies. As for this article, don't peacocks do something similar to the butterflies?
ReplyBecause laziness and just plain ol' screwing around aren't acceptable explanations?
Or, you know, just cover the solar panels in a very thin sheet of a one way mirror, so any reflected light off of the panel is just relfected back by the mirror and adsorbed by the panel.
Reply Hide All See All 8 RepliesI'm gonna say probably not.
HAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAahahha ha... you think physics works like that? Go on wikipedia and see what a one way mirror actually does (hint: not what you think) If you're too lazy to do that, just think about what would happen if what you imagine a one-way mirror to be was made into a sphere, with the reflective side on the inside (hint: massive explosion).
It's a fine uninformed idea!
Excuse our fellow knowledge-seeker phys..., he's just being overly proud of his own knowledge and discerning capabilities.
Bouts of inspired imagination like on your comment should not be denigrated for, as unjust and unjustificated as that would be, it would mean a waste of a creative mind, nevermind the sake of politeness and its intrinsicalities.
Ummm... I have a one way mirror at my work. One side looks like a mirror and the other side kind of looks like sunglasses, very dim but able to be seen through. So physics4534534, if your saying that the one side that is reflective would reflect the light no matter which side the light enters than you have a a point, just clarify or people are going to think your not very smart. If a sphere was made with reflective surface on the inside nothing would happen because there would be no light, it would be like a cave. Any way to put light in would also let light out. Its an impossible theory to test.
Also your mirror ball explosion theory is hilarious, they have videos with a person in a mirror ball, with camera and a light emitting device. Please read up on how light absorbs as well as reflects. Any mirror sphere would be dark like a cave because there would be no light in there, any means of putting light in would let light out. If light was somehow trapped in there it would slowing absorb out because even with the best reflective materials your not at 100%. I dont know how you could possibly test your theory.
@james physics is saying IF one way mirrors act like jabber claims, THEN it would make a light bomb. He may be an ass but he's not that stupid.
"One Way" Mirrors work because one side is lit dimmer than the other. If you are on the brightly lit side, the reflected image is much brighter than any of the light coming from the other side. If you are on the poorly lit side, the reflection is much weaker than the light that is just coming through the mirror. That is more or less how the professor explained it in the optics class I took last semester.
To clarify, one-way mirrors are in no senses one-way, and are in exactly half-a-sense a mirror. To be precise, they are semisilvered mirrors.
A semisilvered mirror passes half the light and reflects the other half. When you look into a semi-silvered mirror what you see is your reflection, and also what is behind the mirror, on top of each other like someone playing Anime J-Pop on top of Vivaldi Strings. The difference is that in the dark room what you see is well... dark. The analogy would be like if we turned the J-Pop nearly all the way down. It's still there and you can still hear it (depending on how far down it's turned), but it won't interfere with your Vivaldi anymore and you can't pick out the lyrics.
This is what one-way mirrors do. They let you turn down the volume on the people in the dark room so they don't interfere with the reflection of the people in the light room.
Try to make a semi-silvered mirror into a sphere, and shine a laser into it, and that laser will (if you get it straight on) bounce out the other side, or back into the laser and out the other side again. Or if you hit it at some absurd angle become an instant disco spray of weak laser blur.
This is why Animorphs was the best book series ever.
ReplyWhat? the ending ruined that series
This is a really cool article! Good show, sir!
ReplyI got sprayed by a bombardier beetle once. Hurt like a mother and left a burn mark on my fingers for nearly a week.
ReplyWhy would you crush a moth under a rolled up magazine? They can't bite or sting or anything, quit being a p***y
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesYeah, suck them up a vacuum cleaner. Magazines are no fun.
Yeah, but they're annoying as hell when they get all up in your face.
I'm covered in moths right now because I'm a manly man and also batshit insane.
Because i like having hole-less clothing?
Where are you people living where moths swarm your faces and rip up your clothes? Have the moths in these areas formed street gangs? (I'm being sarcastic but if the moths really have joined street gangs then feel free to magazine them.)
I love these articles, and they're just made better by good quality writing.
ReplyLike. Like hard.
this article is SO FREAKING AWESOME. I love nature.
ReplyThey said the universe (not just earth, but universe) don't age much to provide all the variation needed in evolution. But that's when you count it linearly. If one generation is needed to come up with a mutation, then you'll need 1000 generation to come up with 1000 mutation. 1 million for 1 million and so on, and it's easily took longer than the time spent.
Reply Hide All See All 6 RepliesHowever, that's only applicable on anything that didn't mate. As Darwin explained, SEX is evolution's way to turbo boost the process. With it, evolution only needs the square root of time. 100 mutation can be obtained within 10 generations, 1 million within 1 thousand, and so on. Moreover, the mutation may come in hordes within a generation and none the next one.
But, as Ann Coulter said, if you are a mutant, nobody will want to mate with you (Cracked readers will beg to differ, but they're just a bunch of stoned fella). Not necessarily. The mutation usually occurs in just one gene among a pool of gene with somewhat similar function. That will render most of the mutation recessive. It takes generations for the mutation to accumulate enough "gene follower" to assert itself, sometimes never. So the mutant will look and act just like the mainstream and mate.
Still nobody will mate with you if you grew a tail!
Yes. But if enough humans grow a tail, those tailed humans will become subspecies on itself, mate with each other. In time there will be two human species, tailed and tailless, each with their respective additional mutation that come along the way to make them more different than just the tail end.
Actually, we already had tails, and evolution did away with them as they kind of lost their function over time, although we still have cute little tails for about 4 weeks as embryos. There are still reported cases of that repressed desire to have a tail coming to fruition - if you google it you'll even see pictures. Thing is, though, most parents nowadays, provided they could afford it, would get the tail surgically removed, and recent babies who have been born with tails do get them removed before they even know what a tail is. So, the baby would have a normal life and a normal relationship with a normal person. Given how incredibly rare the condition is (some 20-odd cases from all over the world since the 1800s) the odds are astronomical that a baby from one of those cases would actually grow up to procreate with another person from those cases. However, it's certainly not impossible, and their procreation would probably, though not definitely, lead to yet another tailed individual, who would also get his/her tail removed. Society is too cruel toward those so unlike ourselves for a parent to take the chance that maybe their tailed kid will grow up to find either a REALLY nice, open-minded person (and/or someone into bestiality) or another tailed person whose parents also took a chance on them.
You absolutely got the right idea; just used a bad example.
@FloatOliver-pretty sure it was just a random example, take a breath!
Gurrty,
Of course it was random; I just thought I'd spread a little information.
Breathlessly yours,
FloatOliver
to be fair, crossbreeding and epigenetics seem to be much stronger factors in evolution than mutations, since most mutations in and of themselves are netural or harmful.
Wanna put in my fun fact. Scientists have recently shown that oft used genes become more prevalent in the sperm or eggs, making those aspects more likely to show up. So athletic parents will have a slighlty SLIGHTLY higher chance of having a VERY SLIGHTLY more athletic kid. This TECHNICLY disproves Darwinian evolution, though he had the right concept mostly. Effectively it means Darwin had the right idea but it's not all random chance anymore, so useful mutations are even more likely to be passed on.
It does nothing to disprove Darwinian evolution. It just helps to prove some of epigenetic theory.
To be fair, Mother Nature has a couple million years on us.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesMore like several billion years
I'll say thousands. Climates change in thousand years pace. If it took millions or billions of years for a species to evolve, that one is a dead one.
^you're either a troll, or someone who has never seen a crocodile.
Mass extinctions happen pretty regularly in the cosmic scheme.
Today a moth got in my way and because it was the only place I could put my foot on I tried to scare it so it could live. After,hitting the floor with my foot so many times I just said f**k it and killed it. So damn stupid.
Reply Hide All See All 7 RepliesA few years ago, a friend of mine was staying over. There was a spider in my room, crawling along the floor. I wanted to kill it, but she, being the bleeding-heart "I must save everything in nature" kinda gal, stopped me, got a piece of paper, and tried to get the spider to crawl onto it. The spider would crawl on, and then crawl off, and then she'd make it crawl on again, only for it to scurry off. This process was repeated for a good 5 minutes before she all of a sudden said "fuck this shit", grabbed a shoe and smashed it.
Eh ... why didn't she get a broom and swipe it out the door instead?
My bedroom is not located anywhere near where the brooms or doors are.
How do you get into your room without doors? Are you a wizard?
I teleport. Doors are for pussies.
That doesn't explain how the spider got in.
Windows. Duh.
Call me when they make moths the size of house cats. Big, fuzzy, six-legged, flying house cats with spiracle mouths FOR DRINKING YOUR SPINAL FLUID! purrr
ReplyNot to mention spider silk.
ReplyBah! Spider silk is bullshit! Carbon nanotubes, however, are the s**t man!
What we have to do now is apply these technologies to the robots in the article "5 Inventions That Prove The Terminator Is Upon Us" and bam! Instant robo-apocalypse.
ReplyHyposprays have existed for a long time. Like, since before I was born. My old man got injections that way when he was in the Army.
ReplyAre people seriously taking an article like this as a platform to push comments about intelligent design? Keeerist.
ReplyWell, technically, these things are designed quite intelligently :D
OK, admittedly I haven't read the rest of the article yet, but learning to fly by studying birds is kind of why we got off to such a crappy start in the first place.
ReplyThat's because birds are so far ahead of us re: flight (especially in terms of maneuverability) that they were a piss-poor choice to imitate for early planes. But birds are used in wing efficiency studies, because their wings are tailored so precisely to the different kinds of flying they do.