5 Advanced Technologies Still Catching Up to Invertebrates
#2.
The Namib Desert Beetle Is a State-of-the-Art Water Collection System
The Namib Desert in Africa is one of the driest places on earth -- it gets less than an inch of rainfall every year. Yet the Namib Desert beetle thrives there.
Via Wikipedia
Put some spinners on this one and it's ready to cruise.
That's because a fog rolls in off of the Atlantic Ocean on most mornings. The beetle will stand facing the wind, using its hind legs to prop itself up to a 45-degree angle, and then let the tiny water droplets collect on its back. The condensation builds until it rolls down to its mouth for a nice morning drink. It seems like a simple but elegant solution to drought, the sort of thing a bug would come up with.
Only, it's not so simple.
How We Can Steal It:
Worldwide, 884 million people lack access to a safe water source. It would sure be nice to harvest fog and turn it into drinking water for them, but our attempts to do so thus far have kind of sucked. One fog harvester near Chungungo, Chile, gathers 4,000 gallons of water a day by using nets to collect condensation, but there's nothing stopping the wind from evaporating the water or blowing it clean off the nets before it can be collected.
Via Art4Logic
Plus, people keep getting too close to the net when they spike the ball.
So researchers have come up with a better idea using the same technology that the Namib Desert beetle uses. It turns out there are tiny bumps on the beetle's back that are a naturally hydrophilic surface. Much like a necrophiliac is attracted to dead people, a hydrophilic substance attracts water. But then the rest of the beetle's back is hydrophobic -- meaning it repels water. So once the droplets get too big to hang onto the water-collecting bumps, they detach and roll down the beetle's back before the heat and wind can steal the water away.
Via rdmag.com
To replicate this, researchers took small beads of glass that attract water and covered their bases in a layer of water-repellant wax. As a result, they were able to capture water out of the air just like the Namib Desert beetle. They hope that this discovery will lead to more permanent and stable panels in order to not just help gather water, but also for dissipating fog. This would be extremely helpful at places like the airports in, say, San Francisco, where flights are commonly delayed because of weather.
#1.
Moths Have Built-In Night Vision Goggles
If you've ever watched a moth stupidly slamming into a light bulb over and over again, you probably thought that this was one species that really didn't have much to teach us.
But because moths are so shitty in so many ways, their eyes really have to be something special. Being both fragile and stupid, moths' only hope of avoiding the many predators who eat them at night is to be able to see better than they do. They accomplish this by having extremely antireflective eyes.
Via Gizmag.com
So that you can't see their equally black souls.
Light that is reflected off the eye is lost information, and even the smallest piece of information can mean the difference between survival and death. Moth eyes are designed to take in as much light as possible and, as such, are one of the least reflective surfaces found in nature.
There is nothing simple about how the moth accomplishes this -- their eyes are coated with nanoscopic structures (that is, smaller than microscopic) that are perfectly designed to keep light waves from bouncing off.
Photos.com
Nothing can escape their horrific gravity-crushing gaze.
How We Can Steal It:
Two words: solar panels.
The problem with solar panels now is that they are expensive and aren't very efficient. The panels are highly reflective, which is the exact opposite of what you want in a device designed to absorb light. Just like light reflected off the eye is lost information, any glare or reflection on a solar panel is lost energy.
In order to reduce this glare, researchers were able to "... nanoimprint the microstructure of moth's eyes into acrylic resin ... using anodic porous alumina molds." Which is just technical speak meaning they made a film that duplicates the antireflective properties of moth eyes. The result is an inexpensive roll of film you can stick over any solar panel and immediately boost its efficiency by 5 or 6 percent. That doesn't sound like much, but you have to keep in mind that modern solar panels only operate at 5 to 18 percent efficiency, and the moth's eye film is an easy upgrade.
Photos.com
That's why the Cracked offices run on diesel.
Meanwhile, other researchers are finding ways to use the tech on everything from antireflective coatings for monitors and eyeglasses to fiber optics, semiconductors and more.
Keep this in mind: To mimic the surface, scientists had to use a focused ion beam to etch the tiny details at a nanoscopic level. Or, to quote one researcher, "... the nanoscopic structures on the lens surfaces had to be smaller than the wavelength of light so as to smooth out the sharp refractive index change as the light strikes the surface ..." That's what it took to imitate what can be found on every moth you've ever crushed under a rolled-up magazine.
Brian Thompson is a freelance writer. He enjoys making new friends on Facebook and being stalked by crazy people on Twitter.
For more things you didn't know about animals, check out 6 Creepy Animal Behaviors That Science Can't Explain. And find out what you were wrong about in The 6 Most Frequently Quoted Bullshit Animal Facts.
And stop by Linkstorm because it's Friday and you gotta get down on Friday.
And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get sexy, sexy jokes sent straight to your news feed.
Do you have an idea in mind that would make a great article? Then sign up for our writers workshop! Do you possess expert skills in image creation and manipulation? Mediocre? Even rudimentary? Are you frightened by MS Paint and simply have a funny idea? You can create an infograpic and you could be on the front page of Cracked.com tomorrow!
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.