Biomimicry

Published Apr 3, 2024, 7:00 AM

We talk about wild human inventions inspired by animal designs!

Guest: Ellen Weatherford

Footnotes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZEGyyeNn8trH-FmcchVthmmppq8-XiQlKILt-9fIISk/edit?usp=sharing

Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on this show, we are talking about biomimicry. It is when humans plagiarized from animals. We are not given any royalties to these creatures, and yet we use them as inspiration for our inventions. We're talking about shark skin suits in a non hannibal elector way, butterfly money. We're talking about gecko tape. And I have a guest who is bringing up some mystery animals even to me, So discover this more as we answer the age old question have you ever rubbed a shark? Joining me today is host of the Maximum Fun Network podcast Just the Zoo of Us. Ellen Weatherford, Welcome woo.

Nobody listening can see me dancing. I'm dancing.

Feel the energy.

Just imagine in your head that I'm dancing and it's like really good, like I'm doing a really really like.

The subtle vibrations of the air waves into the microphone as you dance does give an energy to the audio, a dance energy. Ellen, have you ever have you ever rubbed a shark.

I have rubbed a shark. It's kind of fun. How you ask, because I just told this story like on like two weeks ago, maybe on our podcast. So my husband and I when we were just friends. This was prior to our relationship with a bunch of other friends. Yeah, I got shark. Sond We were out with a bunch of friends on the beach in the middle of the night. We were flying kites at like I don't know, eleven pm. It's pitch black dark. I've got my dog out on this beach. And she runs up and finds a dead bonnet head shark on the beach. Yeah. This is in Florida, by the way, I should have said. And Christian, who is now my husband, picks it up and he's like, you know, checking it out. He's he's looking at he's interested in sharks and stuff. Sure, And I was like, pleas me but I yeah, He's like, I'll mess with it a little bit. And I have historically been absolutely terrified of anything that lives in the water. I don't want to touch it. If it's in the water, I don't want to touch it. And so Christian asks me, because he knows I'm I'm also just a perilously curious person. And he says, do you know what a shark feels like? And I was like, no, I don't. Uh what does it feel like? He goes, I'm not gonna tell you. I was like why not? And he's like, because I think you should get over your fear and touch it. It's dead, it can't do anything to you. So if you want to find out what it feels like, you got to touch it. And he knew that my curiosity was going to get the better of me. And I did, in fact touch the shark and I.

Rubbed it how to feel.

I don't know if you want me to spoil what the texture is.

I've rubbed a shark before, I've rubbed rays, I've rubbed sharks, I've rubbed a lot of things. Your fear about touching things in the ocean is actually pretty reasonable, because there are some things that if you touch, you could die.

Most things will mess you up.

A lot of things in the ocean will mess you up. Like if you see a little yellow octopus with its adorable and it's got bright blue rings, and you know, don't touch that one. It'll kill you with a touch A toxin, So your instinct is correct. But usually a shark, especially dead one, is not going to hurt you if you rub it. So, what did it feel like, Ellen, when you were rubbing that dead shark.

So if you were to pet it as one would a dog, when you pet it from like head to tail in that direction, feels kind of like what you would expect it to, like a sort of smooth feeling from head to tail. But if you were to go in the opposite direction, it is really really rough and sand papery and like a like a really coarse grit sand paper, like you could you could actually get a rash from like rubbing it in the opposite direction.

In fact, researchers do sometimes get rashes, like when they handle sharks gitting too much.

It seems like the least cool injury you could get when working with sharks.

It sounds like it sounds like you could be easily misunderstood if you're like, I got a rash from rubbing this shark. But yeah, it's it's not. It's not ideal thing to rub in the wrong direction. It's actually kind of reminds me a bit of cat tongues, you know, like that, Yeah, like they're kind of smooth in one direction, but they're super sand papery and rough in the other direction. And have you ever liked.

Yeah, and they don't look that way, like when you just look at them, you can't. Yeah.

When you look at a distance, you're like, that's just a little tongue that should feel gross and wet, but it's like actually really rough. And when you look at it more closely, you see all these like kind of tiny like hooks, like it looks a little bit like velcrow. And that's what causes that sort of coarse texture with sharks. The thing that's causing that coarse texture is denticles, which I love the word. It is just such a fun word, and dentical.

You cannot stress enough the d at the beginning delta. We're not talking about tentacles. They're not covered in tiny little tentacles that would be Lovecraftian.

I can only assume that denticles comes from the same I'm gonna say Latin root as dentin or dental meaning tooth, because it is these are tooth like projections, and when you look at a shark skin close up, it kind of looks like tiny our teeth all lined up kind of like dragon scales, I want to say, And so it makes sense then, right, like imagine you're petting a dragon, as I do all the time, and you're petting it in one way where the scales are sort of like the direction the scales are facing, then it will be smooth. But if you pet against it, it's gonna be really rough in sand paper. And so that's why that shark feels like you could sort of you know, finish a wood project, a table that you've been working on.

This is my shark lathed.

Yeah you like you like this banister? I I evened it out with shark, so uh yeah. So they have these these these denticles and they are really interesting because they offer these shark a few cool perks. One is obviously kind of some armor, right, Like it makes their skin a little harder, a little tougher, And you'd think that maybe this is for like shark on shark sort of attacks, but like it, which is true. It can make them a little more tough endurable like against other sharks or whales or large you know fish. But it has a lot of use actually for the small things, so like barnacles, parasites, bacteria, even algae. It the surface makes it harder for them to adhere to, to stick to, and so there it's kind of like you know, like if you have a section cup and you put it on like glass, like that's stuck on there forever and it's really hard to get it off. But if you put it on like a wall that's kind of bumpy, you stick it on there, it doesn't have as much like suction. It's harder to like stick on there. Even though like bartacles don't necessarily use like section to stick on things. It's like a similar concept board. It's like their their adherence to the shark is made more difficult by the fact that it has this y, like sharp bumpy texture.

Like disrupts the sort of adherence to exactly. It's it's funny that you say suction because the like, just two weeks ago, I was talking to a researcher named Amani Weber Schultz who studies were moras and they do suction right on to like the underside or the side of a shark. And a lot of the things we talked about was that she actually studies denticals on different types of sharks and was telling me about how not only do like different species of sharks have different shapes of the denticals, just like how different sharks have different teeth, right, Like you can you can identify, like what shark a tooth came from by the shape of it. And it goes for the denticals too, that if you really zoom in, you could look and like the denticals will have different shapes. But then they'd have different shaped denticals on different parts of their body, like the ones that the nose would be different than the ones at the tail. She was telling me about that, my mind was blown, Like she was. She had some really amazing research that they did on shark scales, because it is so much more complicated than you might think. When you just look at a shark, like you can't even really tell they have those.

Now they're tiny. You really can only see them under a microscope and you can feel them with your hand because of the roughness. But yeah, that's interesting. I mean, like remoras are not necessarily bad for sharks. It's a debate whether there it's a mutualistic versus like a commensal relationship, meaning like the remora might benefit more from the shark than the shark benefits from the remorra, but the remorra is not hurting the shark. So like the I think it's interesting. So like, I think the reason the remort can kind of stick to the shark one thing is that the remort is probably picking a part of the shark that's a little smoother. Also, but also the remorra is larger than say a barnacle, so it's like the larger it is like if you stick a plunger to a wall, you might get some suction where it's like a smaller section cup, you might not get it. I mean again, I'm not saying that the small animals use like section necessarily. It's just like the that surface becomes as you zoom out, it becomes smoother, and then as you zoom in, like when you're smaller and smaller, that's even bumpier for you as a tiny animal trying to like stick on to the shark.

It's funny how like physics works differently when you're just tiny.

Exactly.

No, we're going to talk different physics.

We're going to talk about that some more. I mean, I'm I'm not like a doctor of physics or of anything. Despite what you might think in terms of my you know, garage clinic, but no, I don't have any like I don't have a great understanding of physics, but yeah, it is. It is crazy. So the these denticles, in addition to providing a hostile environment for like bacteria, algae, barnacles, also reduce drag underwater, so it breaks up the res distance from the water and allows them to basically cut more through the water. So like you know, just like with air, will create drag, if you're a shark under the water, you're also gonna encounter some drag, like the resistance of the water against your shape and your body that slows you down. And so by reducing drag, they also so they make themselves more energy efficient, they make themselves faster and quieter. All of this is very important for an apex predator like a shark that wants to be well, not always apex depends on the size of the shark, but a shark that wants to be quiet, it's an ambush predator generally speaking. And it also is it benefits the shark to get to an animal quick more quickly than say other sharks or other predators. So all these things really benefit the shark, it also benefits Olympic swimmers, or at least used to.

So.

The most obvious use of shark skin in terms of human innovation is like a swimsuit to make us swim good and speedo, which is apparently not just a type of swimsuit. It's like a company made a swimsuit out of basically like manufactured fake shark skin. It's not made out of actual shark called fast skin that uses microscopic structures that are similar to denticles to reduce drag, and it was used by Olympic swimmers and it was so good that, like in two thousand and eight, the Olympic Committee was like, Okay, stop, you can't use this anymore. Guys are going too fast, You're breaking too many records and we don't like it, which seems weird to me because it seems fun that we're getting people to be faster and faster. I don't know, I'm not like an Olympics uh expert. I don't really know what the term for Olympics fans.

Is an Olympian Olympia.

I don't think that's is that like, is that someone who's into the Olympics or someone who competes in the Olympics.

I think it's actually someone who lives in Olympia, Washington.

Olympus heads, Olympics heads.

Yeah, so it's I feel like if I was in that position where we're like, oh, we got to do something about these guys swimming too fast with it. Instead, just make the fast skin mandatory for everybody, right level the playing playing field, but faster, everybody going as fast as they can.

I think a good compromise is like, you can use the fast skin, but you also have to dress like a little shark, so you need at dorsh need a little shark outfit.

Like when I was a kid, they sold these like goggle like goggles that had the shark fin on and also these like flippery sort of maybe this was Shark Boy and Lave a Girl tie in merch, but they definitely and March for that movie almost certainly.

That's a deep cut. But no. Yeah, if okay, look compromise Merman and women mer people.

Put everyone in a murrhperson tail.

Everyone everyone gottaware Mermaid outfit shark, but the shark kind the murman, Mrman and Mermaid. Sorry, I feel like we should have more inclusive like merh murpholk murfolk. That's it murfolks, and they have to be shark based murphfolk.

Yeah, I think there's what everybody do it make it mandatory for everybody, then it's equal merfolcification.

So in addition to turning Olympians into murph folk, there are other applications for man made dentacles. You can use it to, like in paint to make the holes of ships more resistant to barnacle attachment, and in medical settings actually to prevent bacteria from growing on surface they're like working on sort of they like basically surfaces in a hospital make them more resistant to bacteria. One way to do that would be to make the service disruptive to the growth of bacteria by doing something similar to shirkskin with like little projections. And then also to improve aerodynamics, right like when turbines airplanes, it's a constant like air, obviously different than water, but similar concept supply in terms of breaking up wind reserves wind resistance, So like some things that work in terms of hydrodynamics might also work in aerodynamics. And that is all I know about the physics of this situation and nothing more.

We maybe at a disadvantage here because I also, uh, not only do I not know anything about physics, tried to learn about physics. I took a physics class in college and I immediately failed, like within two weeks. They were like I was like, they were, I don't know how you have an f already, because I want.

I once answered a question so bad on a physics test in high school. My teacher was like, wait, this was you, and I said yes, and he was like, this made me so upset, and he was like heartbroken that I would answer it so bad. He was like, this made me really sad. And I'm like, wow, I've broken my teacher. I answered a question so bad.

I'm a biology person, leave me alone.

Yeah. I don't even know what I was at that point. I was a World of Warcraft person who wasn't studying. No, I was very studious. I just sometimes would get very much in my own head, like during a test, like overthinking it to the point of writing a small paragraph that made no sense. Anyways, I traumatized my physics teachers the point, so you have some you have some human innovations of your own that you wanted to draw attention to.

I do and Luckily, my first one ties in so perfectly to the one that you were just fantastic because you were talking about, you know, using animal adaptations for increased fluid dynamics, right like better in the case of shark skin, this is hydrodynamic, mineus aerodynamic.

Nice.

So to kind of set the scene a little bit, it's Japan, it's the nineteen nineties.

I'm already sold.

Yeah, Evangelian is huge, city pop playing in the background.

I have a very limited understanding of Japanese culture in the nineties outside of anime.

That's all I got. I'm so sorry, Like.

I am a rube, I'm not city pop is playing.

It's a vibe. Now. The original Shinkansen bullet tree had a problem. They were way, way, way too loud. So these bullet trains had this kind of like blunt, rounded nose, and when the bullet train would go through a tunnel, which these tunnels were often like around neighborhoods and offices and places where people are going to be. So when this train with the rounded nose would go through a tunnel, they would make a booming sound every single time. It would be like a sonic boom that would like wake people.

Up at night. That sounds bad. I love train it's not ideal. Yeah, that would make me turn against trains.

Like I have lived with a train with train tracks literally in our backyard, Like yeah, we have that train would go by.

We have a tram that runs like right outside, and it's fine because it's.

Oh, we had a slight train like great trains going through a backyard, where like when the trains would go by, our dishes would shake in the cabinets and you kind of get used to it after a while. But this was like this was a legitimate, like sonic boom that was happening every single time of training.

It's like that's a form of torture to like wake people up with loud noises.

Maybe it was intentional. I don't know. Maybe there was some sort of CIA. I don't know.

Thomas the tank engine gone CIA.

He's an agent of the state. So this engineer named ag Nakatsu had to figure out how to make them quieter because this was a menace. Ag Nakatsu was also a bird watcher. He spent a lot of time out.

Watching watch birds. Am I right? What?

Oh my god? I could never would be so embarrassing I'd never do that my binoculars in the background.

I'd never get excited about gray tits.

I've never done that. I've never taken pictures from five hundred feet away of a grebe that I wanted to identify later. So being a birdwatcher, he knew about kingfish, which, if you're not totally familiar with what a kingfisher is, it's kind of a stout shaped bird with a really really long, really really pointy beak. A kuka burra is a type of kingfisher. So he was familiar with kingfishers with this really long, really pointy beak. Now, the important thing is that kingfishers often dive into the water because they eat fish. And when they dive into water, they do it at really really high speeds, but they don't splash, like they just kind of seamlessly like dive into the water totally like.

Yeah, it is beautiful, it is gorgeous.

Yeah, like these these guys are they have the game cornered. It is beautiful. So the reason they're able to do this is because their long, pointy, tapered beaks are pushing the water to the side rather than in front, so it's making the water go around their head and behind them, rather than like bunching all of it up in the front and making it splash to the sides. So Nakatsu and his team gathered a bunch of data on Kingfisher beaks, right, they did like you know, high speed videos and observations, and they measured the curvature of the beak and the length and the proportions and everything like that. Used all of that, use what they learned from Kingfisher beaks and tested out simulations of different shapes of trains and settled on this long tapered It wasn't completely pointy in the front, but it was much less rounded than it had been originally. And so in nineteen ninety seven, the West Japan Railway Company introduces the five hundred series, which has a long pointed nose that mimics the beak of a Kingfisher. And not only were the tunnel booms eliminated, so problem solved, mission accomplished. We did it, boys, uh. But the trains were also so aerodynamic that they ran faster and consumed less electricity, so they worked better they did before, and they were cheaper to run, so all around, total win.

I'm looking at these trains and they're pointy. I like it.

It's a pretty train.

One. This is beautiful. I love these trains. It's so cool.

Girly pop train girl.

It's like she is man, she is ready, she is slaying sleigh train. That's fantastic.

This maybe a kawai train.

I certainly, yes, it's a Oh there's a Hello kitty train. Oh my god, man, that's very cool that. This is so cool though, because I love it when it's like there's an animal that looks because you look at a kingfisher and it's they're adorable. Number one.

They're also think of gorgeous.

They are beautiful, right, especially like there's different kinds of species, Like you mentioned, some are more color than others, but there's ones that are like bright blue and orange, and like even their beaks are quite pretty. They can be sort of purply orange and they but the funny thing about them is like they have proportional with their body. Their beak is huge and their head.

And their head is so big.

It's big, so they look like kind of like a bobblehead. And their tail is really short and stumpy, and so they're not really built to be great flyers, like they're fine at flying, but it's really the the diving is where they shine because otherwise they kind of they have a funny looking little body with a little stumptail. And so it is interesting because it's like we look at things like penguins and it's like, man, why would penguins, you know, rid themselves of the ability to fly? That flying seems really cool and really great, But then you look at them underwater and they're beautiful swimmers, just elegant, amazing. Same things with puffins, which actually puffins can fly, but they you know, when you look at them underwater, they're incredibly graceful. And these birds that look kind of like they tend to be very cute as well, like puffins Kingfisher's penguins. Somehow being more hydro dynamic makes makes you cute.

And oh, I didn't mention like why the trains were booming when they were going through the tunnel, because apparently there's like this is once again getting into like the physics of it, but when the train it's specifically when the train is going through a tunnel at high speeds, because the boom had not been an issue when trains were slower, but when the trains are going really fast through an enclosed tunnel, basically all of the air that the train is pushing up against bunches up at the nose of the train and just kind of doesn't have enough space around the train to escape, Yeah, because of the tunnel.

Yeah.

Yeah, So it's bunching up all of the air and creating this like air cushion up in front of the train, so that when all that air gets pushed out of the mouth of the tunnel, it just explodes.

Yeah. It's like it's like you have a like you fill a plastic bag with air and then you slap it and it pops. It makes a big popping sound, but you're doing that with like a train in a tunnel.

Yeah. So when trains were slower, didn't really have that problem, right because you just like it just goes out there, you know, it's it's not going that fast.

Yeah, Like, I mean, I think there's a there's a similar reason, although obviously without the tunnel aspect for sonic booms for planes, right, Like it's like for super fast planes, it's just like it is pushing the air, you know, creating that sort of bunching effect. Even though it's like it's just going so so fast that it creates that kind of like impact of like breaking through this like cone of air.

Yeah, I mean you look at like jets, you know, like, oh, look at fighter jets, and they have the exact same like shape of the nose as kingfisher beaks, right, Like it's it's nearly exactly the same. You can definitely see like a lot. And also you know, you look at a fighter jet. I was just at the Boeing Museum of Flight. The Museum of Flight is in like Taquila, really cool, close to where I live, and I have a three year old, so we've gone to the Museum of Flight like fifty times. And the jets are weirdly shaped almost exactly like a Kingfisher, not just in the pointy knows, but the fact that like the wings are not super long, the tail is pretty short, like the things that you were saying about, Like, yeah, the stumpy tail right kind of like in a lot of different ways reminds me of the Kingfisher's.

So cool, it is, really it's it's neat because the physics that guide animal evolution is also something that we have to pay attention to, and so all these things that we develop are going to converge in terms of natural shapes, either animals, plants, you know, water droplets, whatever. Like we we can't even though we are inventors and we can kind of do things like we at the end, everything on our planet and in the universe has to obey physics, and so we're gonna keep running into these parallel structures, which is very cool. And I love that there's these King Fisher trains that are sometimes pink and purple. The cutter the better, the cuter the better. I think that that cuteness may also have some kind of like aerodynamic thing. I haven't proven it yet, but I'm going to say.

Health design will always bend towards cuteness.

I feel like Hello Kitty will just like make the air around the train and go like, oh okay, like and reduce wind resistance, because who can resist Hello Kitty.

The air simply steps around like right this way, yeah, right.

This way, ma'am, Miss miss Hello. I guess is her.

Name, miss miss Kitty?

Miss Kitty? Okay, I thought her first name's not Hello.

Please call me hello Miss Kitty?

Was my mother? Sorry, Miss Kitty? Yes, Miss Kitty is my mother's name. All right, well, where take a quick break and wait. When we get back, we are going to discuss more inventions inspired or one might say, stolen from animals. Okay, so let's talk about gecko feet, right, they're weird. Huh.

Always I'm always game to talk about gecko feet.

Gecko feet? Have you ever interacted with a gecko?

Boy? Have I? I have had?

No?

Okay, so I've had pet leopard geckos. But leopard geckos kind of don't count for what we're talking about because they're actually like ground. They don't climb or stick on things. Yeah, the leopard geckos stay on the ground, so not important. We'll forget about them.

No, cute, don't forget about it.

I'm cute.

There's stubby little tails. Their cute little face is so good. They're so good.

But I did spend a couple of years working at a pet store, and the pet store i worked at sold crested geckos, which are the little the ones that like it's like those sticky hands that you get at the store, like you can just like smack them on and they love just jump out on sides of stuff. Oh my god, those things scared me so bad because I was always so scared to clean their cage because I knew they were going to jump on and jump.

I had one, so like I had one in college because we had you are not really technically allowed to have pets, and says like, all right, how do I smuggle an animal into my room? Because I love them? And so I got a crust of gecko. I look, I feel like I was not well equipped as a college student who has already sleep deprived to give this leopard gecko its best life. But I tried. I would like feed it because like I would feed it baby food mixed with cricket powder, which was nutritionally sufficient. But I fear that this poor get go was probably very bored, and so like I would take it out quite a bit and let it just jump around and then freak out when I couldn't find it because it's like, oh God, I'm gonna step on it. But then I'd always find it. And it had these amazing feet that like when you look at them, they're kind of flat and splayed out and almost leaflike each toe and each toe would have all these ridges and they're so sticky, velvety, very velvety. It's very soft, and they are They stick to walls, they stick to my shirt, my skin, and yet there's no residue left behind. They're not slimy, they're not gooey. There's no like glue like secretion that's coming out of these guys. So it's like it's still this it's like this weird sticky feeling, and yet when unless it poops on me, there's no residue left behind, And so what is what's going on with those feet? So it's really incredible, and it involves physics that it's a little above my pay grade, but I'll do my best. So they are not covered in slime, but they have a bunch of these tiny ridges, and each ridge is covered in hundreds of thousands of microscopic hairs. And these microscopic hairs use something called weak Vanderval's force that helps them adhere to surfaces, which you know Vander's valls you climb up zim so the Vandervo force. I think I use that joke the last time I talked about these geckos, but you know.

Well I wasn't here.

So we're making recycling. Recycling is good for the planet, so recycling jokes must also be good. So the Vanderwald's force is a weak electrostatic force that occurs when two molecules are really close to each other, but not too close, so it's like this, there's this like if they're too far, you don't have the force at all. If you're too close, you actually it's like a slight repair helling force, kind of like when you hold two magnets together with the same polarity, they kind of repel each other. But if you're at this sort of Goldilock zone, there's a slight weak attraction between these molecules and it has something to do with electron density, and there sort of ends my ability to comprehend where it's like there is like you know, but the general idea of like electrons or molecules and electrons is that they're usually trying to find some kind of balance of like the number of electrons, and so if you have sort of a lopsided electron density, you might have a slight attraction to another molecule because they have like electrons that are like, oh, I can sort of fill in this space that's less dense, or it could repel it, right, like if it's like dense, and then it like kind of pushes against the other and.

It may help people to know that. Like the electrons themselves have like a negative electric chart, yes, and the protons and the nucleus of the atom have a positive electric charge. That's like you can get like just like how magnets have like a north and south pole, right, Like the positive and negative positively charged areas attract negatively charged areas, but if the negatively charged areas are too close together, then they be like.

No no, no, no, no no no exactly exactly so, but it's so strange because it's like it's happening on this extremely tiny scale, and then it's also like you know, on the atomic scale. And then it's it's something that the it's not just like a force that is consistent. It depends on the position of molecules. Like if they're too close, they are somewhat repellent, but then if they're like just close enough, there's a slight attraction. Physics is wacky.

There's a I want to say that, like the don't the ridges in it like give it a higher surface area, so there's like more attract.

Too, exactly, yes, and so when you they also each hair ends not just like that's the end of the hair, but it actually ends in sort of like a bristles or like a dandelion puff of things called so the hairs themselves are called cite, and then on top of the hairs, the like bristles are called spatula. And so because there's millions of these hairs, and then on each hair there's like hundreds of these spitula, there's hundreds of millions of like points of connection to the surface. And so even though the van Dervald's force is super super weak, when you have a ton of it, right, like a ton of hairs and a ton of connections, it's strong enough to hold up the little body of a gecko. Maybe not a human body, right, we've never invented gecko shoes that work. But like, if you're light enough and you have enough of these these hairs, these connection points that are tiny enough that they can get close enough, like they have to be tiny, right, so that they can actually get close enough to the molecules on the surface. And so like you have all of these teeny tiny you know, nano like points of contact that each one is like very weakly attracted to the surface. But then you add it up times hundreds of millions and then you get like an actual force that you can observe. You actually can observe this even if you don't have a gecko in your life. When you're using microfiber cloths to clean your glasses, or you know, to dust or something like, you have a sort of dust that has like a little bit of you know, microfiber or something, and it like like it attracts dust to it just like slightly, and that also uses Vandrvald's forces. So you know, this is very cool, and obviously we need to exploit it for our own human needs for tape that doesn't leave residue, because that is like the number one issue facing humanity is tape that leaves too much residue.

So we need everybody we've got on this.

Every like every mind. Take them away from cancer research and get get you on some tape that doesn't leave that gross residue on walls.

Do you think that there's like a lobby against this product by big Googon Do you think big like bring them down many googon.

Googn's pockets run deep as all I'm gonna say but follow the money, follow the so yeah, it's researchers looked into how to recreate this, and they used carbon nanotubes, which are like very very very teeny tiny structures that you can use with carbon molecules, and uh, you can create these like uh, you know, like electron microscope structures essentially, and they created kind of like similar to like the gecko feet where it's like not just like a uniform surface of the carbon nanotubes, but like sort of like these this like you know, micro pattern of these things making points of contact, and that allowed them to create a tape that's like super sticky using these Vandrvold's forces, but doesn't actually have like a residue, and it's called nanotape and you can actually buy it. It's like been out for I don't know, around a decade.

I have definitely seen people like on TikTok or something talking about like hanging up posters with nano tape. It's like it's supposed to be a very renter friendly basically because it doesn't pull up the tape, it doesn't leave a hole behind in the wall. It just it's like it never happens. But the drawback is that it's really really weak.

It's carry we don't hang a shell a little bit. Yeah, you can't hang a shell with it. You can hang posters, maybe a super lightweight picture frame with a bunch of the tape. But yeah, it's very weak. But that's because Vanderval's forces are weak. But you could probably like tape a gecko to your wall with this nano tape, just the one gecko, just one gecko. Like if you put it on a gecko's back, now the gecko can be sticky on both sides.

Then you drop the gecko and you see which side it lands on. And like the cat with a buttered toast on its back.

Don't actually put nanotape on gecko. Be nice to gecko. Probably be a better owner to gecko than I was in college. Like it wasn't mean to the gecko. I just feel like it did not get enough stimulation mentally, This poor little gecko.

The only thing I remember about the crested geckos that I took care of in our store. First of all, so soft, their whole body, velvety, so soft. You don't think of reptiles as being soft, but they're legitimately very soft. And pleasant to touch. And also their food which is like a powdered food that you'd like mix with like moisture, smelled amazing.

Mingo, Yeah, no, I mixed it. I would mix so it was like this powder is like maybe it wasn't powdered crickets, but some kind of protein powder mixed with baby food.

I was always so so so tempted to just just take a little, just a little.

Taste to like vitamins. It tasted like kids vitamins.

It was, you know, so it just makes me want it more. I love kidamins.

I just feel like I should have made like a tiny baby Bjorn and taken this gecko out and about with me just because like I just feel like this geka must have been bored because I would try to play with it. But you know, other than it just launching itself across the room, like what else is there? Like it's like, great, the same futan over and over again.

So I don't know, and so nice hear geckos. Don't drop them or put tape.

On them exactly, don't, I mean, but let them jump around, give them, give them fun stuff, build like.

It, take them to a trampoline park.

Yeah, yeah, uh yeah, I'm gonna say, if it's like crusted gecko day at the trampoline park where it's only crusted geckos play.

Or indoor skydiving. Man, if you've took they can jump around as much as they want.

If you took a crusted gecko to chuck e cheese, you'd never find that thing again.

That's gone.

It's gone, it's gone. So Elle, you got you got something for me, You got some kind of invention for me to hear about.

I do I have a second invention. So have you ever heard of a little fish called the yellow boxes?

Shoot? Love it.

They're so cute.

They're cute and they move so funny. It's like they because they got the teeny little itty bitty fins, but they beat them real hard, like so kind of like, I mean, not the same as hummingbirds because it works kind of different underwater, but it's a similar effect where they just kind of like boop boop boop move around.

Yeah. Yeah, So anybody who's not familiar with the yellow box fish will be astonished to learn that it is named for the distinct square shape of it's a body. And could you do fair boxy which is kind of like you have to kind of be looking at them from like dead on to see like the box shape, because from the side they kind of look like a maybe just a chunky fish. But what's really kind of surprising, like you said, is that despite their very sort of bulky and unwieldy form, they are the opposite of hydrodynamic, right, just they're a complete blunt face.

But they're like a zion shape.

Yes, yes, like the S and I'm glad you said that because that's along a similar vein. But they're surprisingly agile swimmers, so they can have these little bursts of speed where they can swim forward really really fast, but they're really really good at making tight turns, so they can turn on a dime. They don't have to, like a lot of other fish maybe need to be kind of like moving forward while they swim or like while they turn.

I got a dripped a little bit, but these guys, yeah, because they.

Can just ye on a dime. They can kind of swivel around, and they're really really agile in the water. So because they're such you know, skilled little swimmers, the engineers at Mercedes Benz were inspired to try modeling a car after the box fish.

Slap slap on one of these box fish, like, how what can I do today to get you inside one of these bad boys?

You slaping the side of it, like this bad boy can fish so much planked in it?

Yeah, making a wet squelching sound every time he hits the fish.

Which I'm already excited about because this is just a cute fish and I love a cute car. So I'm like, I'm I'm here for it really just visibly, I want to just esthetically, I'm down.

I feel like it should be the same rules as the Olympians rules, where if you make a box fish car, it has still look like a big box fish.

It needs to have the spots on it, yeah, and make like it would have been great if they have.

It needs to have bubbles come out of the tailpipe somehow.

It needs to be as cute as but you got to lean into it. They didn't lean into it as much as I wanted them to. And this was just a concept car. This didn't actually make it to the market. This was introduced in two thousand and five and it was called the Bionic, which is maybe too cool of a name for what the car actually looked like because bionic I feel I associate with bionicles, which I don't know if they're but it was like robot toys, Yeah, little robot toys that were popular when I was a kid. I don't know if they're still popular, but it makes me think of like a very cool transformer zesque sort of robot.

Yeah, I'm looking at it.

It's a box.

The thing I appreciate is they did make it shiny and yellow. It's a very pretty color, so it's it's neat. I mean, box fish are The cute thing about box fish is that they aren't like shiny and yellow, but they are bright yellow and they some species at least have these like like little black thoughts. They're black polka dot and adorable, so cute, So it's it's yeah. I can see though that the shape is sort of box fish like. It's not nearly as cute as box fish, but it is.

And they did kind of back off on like the squareness of it. It does have like still sort of an identifiable car shape.

But what is like, what is the physics concept behind this? Like why is this okay? Why is the shape good?

So the engineers believed like this was the plot process was that the square shape of the box fish was both reducing drag in the water and stabilizing the body. So the thinking was that if the fish tilted in one direction, the water swirling around it would push against the projecting angles of the body, so like it would have these sharp angles on like sort of all sides of its body to push against swirling water when it tilted. So the idea was that this was keeping it upright when it made these sharp turns. But this introduced a paradox. So the stabilization from that kind of maneuvering should make it more difficult for the fish to make sudden tight turns. Right if the if the angles are pushing against the water, then that should make it not very good at making tight turns. So people were kind of baffled as to how the fish's box shape could be both more maneuverable and more stable, because those two things should be a kind of a trade off from each other. You should either be more maneuverable or more stable, not both. So in twenty fifteen, this was ten years after the bionic was sort of displayed. It like I said, it didn't really go anywhere it was just a cool idea. Ten years later, researchers printed, not printed, they made no, they did print. They made three D printed models of box fish, and they ran fluid dynamic simulations where they would like put them in, you know, a box full of water and like jet water over it basically to see how the water flows over their bodies and move them around to see like how the water flowed around them. This was to test how well they actually reduced drag, and it turned out that they were terrible at it. They created a ton of drag in the water, so they produced twice as much drag as non box shaped fish. And they also found that their shape actually destabilized them in the water and made them more likely to spin out with the flow of water around them. So like they were not stable at all, like highly maneuverable, not stable. So if they were to kind of continue on with this car design, you would have a car that could make tight turns, but it was going to be falling over, like it was going to be tiling.

Well, the thing is that like box fish don't use wheels, so like the location is different. It's not them like on a road encountering wind resistance, it's them under the water encounting like water resistance, but also the locomotion is from the little the cute, little stubby fence.

Yes, that was kind of what they came to the conclusion of because they had always kind of like the paradox was under the assumption that the shape of the fish was providing its stability. But after running these simulations and finding that it actually wasn't, the scientists were like, well, how do they actually swim so well? Because you can see the end result they're a good swimmer. So like, how are they a good swimmer if they're not? Like, how are they not spinning out every time you know, a stiff breeze rolls by. I don't know what the equivalent oc current? Yeah, So like why why are they not spinning out at all times? And the scientists for, like, I mean they have fins like they cars don't have fins, like they have something cars as.

And cool Lightning strike.

And that is of course to make it go faster.

Yeah, light makes it go fast.

Yeah. So the fish's tiny little fins are actually perfect because they're so little and so stubby, they can make very very quick, rapid movements in the water. So they can make tiny adjustments to fix their tilt and keep them stable when they would otherwise be spinning out.

Likes it's more like a drone and not like a car.

Yeah, like really great for like staying in one spot and like swiveling around, but not super great for going forward very fast. Right, And that that research. By the way, I found the paper. It was called box fish swimming paradox. Resolved forces by the flow of water around the body promote maneuverability. And that was by Weasenberg at All in the Journal of the Rural Society in February of twenty fifteen.

Man at All the at All family, Like.

They're killing it.

They're killing it so many papers.

Yeah, So I thought it was kind of funny that like all of this, this entire car was designed based on like an assumption. But I mean, you know, people hadn't checked at that point. It was a pretty reasonable assumption.

Cry.

But it's than ten years later scientists were like, yeah, isn't that weird. We should check.

Try to make a car in the shape of a box and see what we can see.

Yeah, Like we can see like cars did hit the consumer market that are box shaped. Yeah, my husband had one at the time when we got together, one of those Scions, Yeah, the Sion box cars.

We would always it's nice, there's wind.

Would always there was certainly a lot of that, and we would make a joke because sometimes we were little Hellians, we were little hooligans, you know, speeding around at night and stuff, and we would joke that if we ever like spun out or if the car flipped or something, it would be like rolling a dike.

It's just like, there's really windy part when you're driving sort of up California, near northern California, there's some of this farmland that just gets super windy because there's no like mountains around to disrupt the wind. And I like, I was like, am I is my car just gonna get tipped over because it's shaped like a box and this is windy.

Every time it feels.

Like, yeah, it feels like I'm just gonna get like blown away and then just tumbleweed my way off the road. Well, it's good. Try everybody with the box fish car.

Good, honestly, keep making it. It's a cute car.

Make a box fish. I want a box fish drone shape.

Make more cars for purely aesthetic, tell you or cuteness?

Yeah, the cars are boring now I hate them. So they're all this gray, gray or black and shape like a turd.

Bring back the bionics.

Let's have bionical cars.

All right.

Well, we're going to take a quick break and when we get back to more inventions that will change your life or not, I don't know. But they're inspired by animals. All right. So Ellen, what's what's your two favorite things in the world?

My two? I can only pick two. I'm gonna say Cappy Baris and the Ben and Jerry's Dirt Cup flavor.

Oh, that's a good Those are two good things. Mine mine is a butterfly wings and money.

Mmmm, I do those are great things. I love both of them.

But you're kind of like the bin and like if I could chill out with a Kappy Barra and have Ben and Jerry's Dirt Cup ice cream and hang out with the karap bar at the same time, that'd be cool. But the thing is I can use the money to get the to get the Ben and Jerry's and the butter It's.

True money will unlock all of those experiences and.

The butterfly wings to fly myself to Kappy Barra World where you can hang out with the Kabby Burros. That's not a real thing, but I want it like a Jurassic Park. But for Cappy barras so.

Much lower stakes. If they had like a containment breach, it would not be an issue.

Right, And so look, you know what, like why what if money was butterfly wings? That would be much prettier than stupid old dead presidents. And there is a potential to use butterfly wings structure in money for things like counterfeit protection. So butterfly wings like that of the morpho butterfly, can offer these really amazing iridescined hues. Sometimes butterfly wings will have like may actually have some pigment in it, but a lot of times butterfly wings actually produce color not through pigment but through structural coloration. So we see color when light of different wavelengths bounce off a surface and then bonk into light sensitive receptors at the back of our eye. Pigments work by basically they absorb all of the wavelengths of light that you don't see, and then only the wavelength of light that it does not absorb that bounces off of the pigment into your eyeball is what you see. So like jazz is about all of the colors that it does not absorb, So like an apple absorbs everything except for the red wavelength, and so it looks like a red apple. Now, structural coloration it's still all about wavelengths of light hitting your eyeball, but instead of it being about absorbing light other than the one color wavelength that you see, it actually works by bending length through tiny structures, usually little tiny ridges or kind of hole like structures that kind of act like microscopic prisms. So instead of absorbing the light, it is refracting and bending and changing the direction in wavelength of the light. And so this is one of the reasons that structural coloration often results in this like iridescence. So colors that like shimmer and shift as you change the angle at which you view them or change the direction of the light. So the light wavelengths actually can interfere with each other, just like you know, like when you're looking at a surface of water and you have ripples. Sometimes the ripples can be additive and sometimes they can be subtractive, like they can interfere with each other. That amplifies the ripple effect, and sometimes they can interfere and basically cancel each other out. And this can happen with light with a surface where it's like one wavelength of light is sort of hitting the surface at one angle and kind of maybe below or near another wavelength light, and then as they're refracted, if they're kind of bonking into each other, they can actually either amplify and create a stronger brighter wavelength or cancel each other out and make it minmals. So like when you're looking at a morpho wing, sometimes it shifts can even like kind of shift between like bright bright like almost blindingly bright blue or like black, like you can't see any of it, So it's like that's why you get that weird iridescent shift in color.

Taking pictures of them can be a nightmare, yeah, because you have to get it from like the perfect angle. And then even when you I feel like when you take a picture of one, you don't really get the same effect, like it just it doesn't look as good. Yeah, you really have to see it in person to really.

Right, because once you've taken the picture, when you've taken the picture, you've there is no longer the actual structural coloration of the wing, you have pigment. You've turned the structural coloration. The camera has captured the light information from the structural coloration, but then it's turned it into what is essentially pigment, right or like you know, pixels work a little different from pigment because it's actually like emitting light directly at you. But you know, if you look at a photograph, that's turned it into pigment, or if you're looking at it on the screen, it's turned it into pixels that are emitting light. So everything from butterfly wings to bird feathers, even some species of snakes have scales that can do this. There are some types of plants that can use structural coloration to create these amazing effects. And so what people are working on is turning that literally into money. So like there's this company called nanotech Security, which is totally not a cyberpunk dystopia money security company that's going to steal your soul. It is trying to introduce structural coloration to money to help prevent counterfeit dollars. So the idea is that if you create a portion of the money that has like these microscopic structures that offer an iridescent image. It would be so hard and expensive to try to counterfeit that that it would be a way to prevent counterfeit money, so like it'd be super like to create that kind of microscopic nanostructure would be quite a challenge for someone who's like, I'm going to put this dollar in photoshop a hip print. I don't know what how counterfeiting works. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but so far they have not created this yet. There's no butterfly wing money. I think it would be cool if we just now, I don't want to hurt actual butterflies, so not like real butterfly wings, but just making money in the shape of butterfly.

Wings, and that just was the currency.

Exactly, Like haven't it cool? Because then we could have a real sort of like fairy cottage core aesthetic to our late stage malignant capitalism that I think would be kind of fun. I like that.

I'm imagining that maybe the different like amounts of currency could be like different types of butterfly wings. Maybe like a monarch is worth a certain.

Amount exactly like a mor fo is, maybe like a fifty dollar Atlas.

We've become full circle. We've come full circle as a nation. We've looped all the way back around to having monarchs on our money again.

Maybe like a I don't know what would be what would be like a one dollar bill? Who would get stuck with that? Uh?

Maybe like a moth?

Poor, just a normal moth? Yeah?

Anyone? Who? Okay, have you played Skyrim?

I have I Skyrim, No, but I know of it. I have definitely seen Skyrim. I've seen a Skyrim.

I've seen aware aware of it. H So, when you're playing Skyrim, if you're playing Skyrim for the first time, there's an experience, there's like a cannon event, there's like an experience when you're playing Skyrim. You know a lot of what you're doing is like you can as you're walking through the world of Skyrim, you can like forage basically you'll pass by like plants. Yeah, yeah, you could just when you pass things, that'll say like collect thing, and you can just you know, harvest things. And so I, like many other people, have had this experience of just walking observing, just taking in the beauty of the world of Skyrim. And then who comes along but a sweet little butterfly, a beautiful, just lovely little butterfly, and the thing comes up. The prompt says collect blue butterfly, and I'm like, I get to catch butterflies. How blissful? This is amazing. I'm gonna just catch it, thinking like in a jar. Perhaps I'm just going to catch this little butterfly and keep it as my little pet.

Yeah.

So I collect the butterfly and it says added to inventory two butterfly wings. I was like, that's not what I wanted.

You just reach out with a big, meaty fist and grab it. Yeah, just I was like, grip it apart.

I was like, I feel like I was just manipulated into doing an animal cruelty that I didn't mean to.

Yeah. There is a mod to Skyrim where it turns all the dragons into Thomas the tank Engines and that Yes, I saw that video and that's pretty much the only thing that Sebber made me want to play Skyrim, because otherwise I feel like I would be too scared of all the dragons. But if it's Thomas the tank Engines, I think I could handle it.

I'm just thinking that if if butterfly wings were a valid currency, in Skyrim that would be great, and that you could just collect those money.

Yeah, right, like and then if you can, like uh, I don't know, fairies can use them as accessories. I don't really know how Skyrim works, but I feel like butterfly wing money might make capitalism less lame.

On the one hand, it would be bad to like incentivize people to take wings off of butterflies. On the other hand, it would be cool if that would encourage people to perhaps make environmental choices that would like increase the population of butterflies. Yeah, so like maybe I do think the environmental incentive.

Yeah, I do think these should be like fake butterfly wings. I don't think these should be literal like rip the wings off of a butterfly and then buy a Snicker's bar with it. Situation that might be untenable. But yeah, like if we could, if we could like produce sort of like artificial butterfly wing currency, that'd be awesome.

Last thing, what if what if spotted lantern fly wings were money? Ah, then we're incentivizing people to go out and take the wings and kill the spot of light.

Butter lantern flies are super invasive, Uh, I think I mean they were on the East coast, but I think they're spreading out outwards. But yeah, they are.

They're like reproducing faster than anyone could kill them.

It's bad because they you know, like when you have a super invasive species like that they put shout or eat or out compete native species, and that's bad. So when you see a spotted lantern fly, which they're kind of pretty actually because they have like black and white spot wings and like sort of a reddish pink, it's it's it's pretty. But where are they there are they from a yeah, and so like they are, it's not it's not good because as invasive species, they are wreaking havoc on the sort of native species, and you are supposed to kill them on site. I think, yeah, like either as currency or one of those things. Like they used to have the like machines where you could put bottles in them and then like you get money for recycling bottles. Like if we could have a bounty, a bounty, if we could have bounty on on uh yeah, these guys, like that would be fun and then we could all pretend to be like hardcore bounty hunters when we're squishing bugs.

You could be super cool about it, get like kidded out.

Yeah, like wear a necklace of their wings.

Yeah, because now you're an eco warrior.

Yeah, exactly, you're killing. It's like if all the if we could like pay people for it, and so like all the trophy hunters who like kill animals that don't need to be killed, and then we can get them on the case, like, look, this will now people will reward you for for draining the life out of an animal.

I'm just saying, if we've already got like we're already having to suffer through capitalism, we might as well like make it work for us one.

Situation, right exactly, Let's get one good use out of it. Yeah, let's uh, let's turn our sites towards killing the right thing this time. We got it wrong a lot of times, but this time I think we'll get it right. Ellen, you got one more invention?

I do. I have one more. And once again, this one actually slots pretty well along with what you were talking about, because mine is also about it's not a bug, but it is an arthropod. And I think if you're like a bug chaotic person, like if you're like bug inclusive and bugs if it's little guys and it's bug.

Yeah, that's my my yea crabs is bugs.

This is about millipedes.

Oh, yes, phillipedes is bugs for sure.

Millipedes gotta be my favorite bug. Like obsessed with these little guys. They're so friendly, they're friends shaped, they won't like bite you, like, they're so chill and cool.

And I had one crawl up my leg when I was a kid. I think it was trying to just make friends with me with its many, many, many tiny tickli little legs. I was not into it just to have this thing. Yeah, just the startling aspect of this thing crawling up my legs saying hello with all those legs. Uh. You know, I didn't love that experience. But now I feel like that I've got on some distance. I like them. I'm a new one.

Also, I feel like, if you don't if you don't confidently know the difference between a millipede and a centipede, which centipedes will bite you and they're very mean, I could definitely, you know, see, if you didn't know whether it was a milliped or somethede, you would just probably err on the side of caution.

Yeah, bite you millipedes are round and shiny and nice, and cinipedes like.

A little sausage.

Yeah they look, there's fun. Sausage shaped. Centipedes are mean and pointy and auchi shaped well.

So importantly for the millipedes, millipedes have two sets of legs per body segment, as opposed to centipedes, which only have one pair of legs. Millipedes have way more legs many they have tiny, tiny little legs.

They have a million of the peds.

A milla of them. So each pair of millipede legs moves symmetrically while both legs on eye their side lift at the same time, which is different from how like vertebrates walk. For example, you don't like, you know, lift both of your front legs and both of your back legs at the same time. You know, like, vertebrates don't typically walk like that, but millipedes do. So the individual pairs each move with a wave motion, so that when the millipede is walking forwards, the waves ripple from the back of the body towards the head. So if you were like looking really really closely at a millipede, that like kind of like a crowd in a stadium doing the wave. How like everyone throws their hands up at the same time. That's kind of what their feet are doing. But it moves. Yeah, it moved from the back of the body towards the head. But millipedes can also walk backwards, in which case they just do it in reverse.

So the wave, that actual wave reversus.

Yeah, so they can do like from from the head to the back to move backwards. It is really really cool. And importantly, having so many points of contact with the surface beneath them makes also their legs are really really short and their body is short and round. This makes them extremely stable. Like you are not going to knock a millipede over unless you're like human sized, you could be really big, but.

Crawling up your leg and you run around a few times, yeah, then it takes a little bit of panic to running for it to fall off.

Well, so keep in mind that they're like detritivores, right, So they're usually crawling around on things like logs and dirt and rocks. They're low on the ground, they have to crawl over a lot of uneven terrain. There's a lot of obstacles they have to crawl over and around, so and they get so incredibly stable.

Yeah, it's like they've got such stubby legs and a round body, but they are so stable and.

So able to and really good at like maneuvering around the.

Obstacles over stuff, like they're good at it.

So the sort of combination of the flexibility and the resilience of this style of walking has inspired designs for robots. So the one that I could find when I was looking around all about this a little bit is a tiny like only like a millimeter or two long. So this is tiny, tiny, soft bodied robot that was developed by that has been developed by the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence Systems, And it may I think, you know, I haven't seen them anything about them actually rolling this out or like using it. I think it's kind of maybe still in development. They're still kind of working with it to see if they can use it someday. But it may someday be used to move through the human body.

Ooh, millipedes inside my blood stream.

Robot millipedes inside your bloodstream.

I'm into it.

Uh, not cyberpunk at all. I'm sure get those bod.

In my body.

I want bug blood, Get me bug blood, get.

Them up in there, have them wiggle around and do their medicines, medicines on me in there.

It is what is the idea is that they're meant to carry medicines through that's a door. So if you have like medicine, I think it's meant to be used as maybe like a possible alternative to surgery.

Yeah, doctor about you have like yeah, it's just a little guy.

You just let him zip and zoom up through your bloodstream and just don't think about it too hard, Like, don't think about it too much.

I like thinking about bugs in my blood stream doing medicine on my heart.

The thing is, you've already got little critters in there.

And they're not doing anything that great, Like you got yeah, you got little time, You got little crabs on your eyelashes and they're just hanging out there.

Like yeah, you you definitely have more creatures on you than you think you do. So like, what's one more? It's not gonna hurt. And this one's a robot, so it's fine. It's a doctor to anything.

This robot didn't go to five years of medical school to be called robot. It's a doctor.

Robot, doctor robot millipede. Yeah, which doctor robot millipede. Great band name there, it is, but it is also very cyberpunk, you know, like the idea of like putting robots in your body. We've had a lot of cyberpunk talk.

Yeah, right, future and so.

So this I came across this stuff when I was doing notes for an episode on millipedes years ago, and then this morning I was kind of refreshing and I was like, you know what, I'm gonna look aroun. I'm gonna see if anything else has been Because I took these notes years ago, I did find a new paper, a research article from November of twenty twenty three where researchers looked at millipede turning and bending as inspiration to develop navigational strategies for robots. So they basically looked at the ways that millipedes can use their legs to turn their body and get around obstacles and stuff, and are like using that to develop strategies for how we can get robots to do the same thing. Because you imagine, just like scale up a millipede to like a huge size, you could you know, you could use that for things like Mars like exploration or a moon exploration. Like you're gonna need a robot to get around bumpy rocks and stuff. And that paper was called leg Body Coordination Strategies for Obstacle Avoidance and Narrow Space Navigation of Multi Segmented Legged Robots And that was by ming Chinda at All in Frontiers in Neurobiotics.

Very cool, three, very cool. Just one note about the paper name a little long. I could call it we put we put robot bugs on Mars question mark?

What if?

What if? Robot?

What if bug? Robot?

Bug? Robot on Mars question mark? I think it's the idea cross and a lot fewer words. But now that is that is rata tech. I love that. I love bug robots. Bring it, sock it to me, like I'll allow the singularity to happen if they're all cool bug shaped robots. Like if I got to look at like a humanoid robot being like we're in charge now, I'm president now, it's like, eh, I don't love that. But if it's like a robot bug going like I'm president now, it's like all right, you know what, Yeah, it's your turn. That's fine.

Maybe you'll do a better job. Probably, maybe you take a swing at this. Yeah, sorry about the mess we left.

Yeah, we didn't do a great job, but you guys are And I feel like in the Matrix they kind of make the robots all sort of like squiggly and bug like, and like if I was a human in the Matrix, I'm like, Wow, you guys built us like Disneyland for our brains. It's kind of nice.

The bug robot takes office and he's like, who closed last night? This is a mess. This sucks. You guys live like.

This, but that's cool. I also I appreciate that, like millipedes have like such tiny brains and tiny nervous systems, but they are capable of such complex movement, right, like the undulating waves of their legs. Like if I was a millipede, I would immediately get confused and fall over.

To like we're struggling with the two I've got. Yeah, Like I'm already, yeah, my life on just the two.

Like when you're like climb stairs and sneeze at the same time and I try it, I fall down and almost kill myself. It's an either or yeah, So I man. Props to the millipedes and props to tiny doctor bugs that are gonna be like crawl up in our body fluids and do doctor stuff inside.

Let him, I don't let him. Well, we can't talk about robot bugs without talking about Wild Wild West, of course obligatory.

I've never seen it. That was the one with Will Smith.

You're not missing anything. Yes, it did have Will Smith and it famously he turned down the role as I think it was Neo and the Matrix. I think he did actually turned down the leading role in the Matrix to do Wild Wild West instead, which was notoriously a very terrible movie. It was very very bad. But one of the sort of most uh intriguing things about the movie is that at the end, a giant robot spider shows up, a giant It's like a sitty explain it. Just keep in mind, keep in mind this is like, you know, steampunk West's Steampunk West. This giant steampunk robot spider shows up at the s and it's just there's kind they kind of like hinted at, like there was something like, oh, there's something and then oh, it's a giant robot spider.

It's Jeff, you know, ings around.

But it is kind of like this, you know, the idea being that like this bug body shape is very very stable, and yeah, good at getting around, and it's already it lends itself to robotics. Yeah, yeah, it feels very mechanical. And yeah there's a giant robot spider like not to spoil it, sorry.

Yeah, oh god, now I can never watch. Yeah. No, there's hydraulic there's hydraulics. There's pist in action with spider legs that lends itself well to like robot you know stuff. So I'm into it.

Scuttling.

I like a scuttling robot that you know that gets in my interstitial body fluids. So that's great. Ellen. Before we go, we got play a little game. It's called them Yes Squawk and Mystery Animal Sound Game. Every week I play Mystery Animals Sound except for last week and the week before because I played a Listener Questions episode and then a Easter rerun. But from two weeks ago we had a Mister animalsone and it the clue was like, don't be when I hear this, I'll pack my bag, all right, Ellen, who do you think this is good? Yeah, it's pretty bad.

The hint that you gave led me to believe it wasn't.

I'll packa I think I said it. I think I said it a little bit less spoilery. Last time. It's like I'm packing my bags when I hear this, But this time I couldn't. I couldn't help. But the pun.

I have to meta game and say that based on the hint, I think it was an alpaca, but also if it is, if I'm right and it's an alpaca, I will be shocked.

Yeah it's an alpaca, there's no way. Yeah, it's an pack alarm call. They make a horrible sound when they are alarmed.

Yeah, that sucks. They should not do that.

They should stop this.

You should teach them a different one. Yeah, y'all can't be doing this.

Like the recording device is clearly struggling here, like it is peaking.

Uh, they're clipping.

It is clipping. I am trying.

For a second, I legitimately thought, I was like, are you having an audio issue? Is this a weird like? I thought so the audio get corrupted?

I thought so too. In fact, I'm gonna like, I'm gonna find a different one, just so you can get the sense that this is not just a crappy recording. It is a terrible sound as well. Yeah, there it is. There's that good stuff right, direct that right into my ear holes.

Yeah that sucks, that's awful like that.

Yeah, that's fun. But you know, our packas are very very defensive, very territorial, and they will use this as a warning call for the rest of the I'll paka herd to be on high alert and they will. They will stomp and they will be aggressive if they feel like they are in danger. They are not demure creatures much like donkeys. They are not demure. In fact, sometimes like llamas or all, packs are used by farmers with like other animals to basically protect them and be like be their buddies because they're very very protective of their territory and their herd.

They know they're worth they have boundaries. They excellent communication skills. Honestly, it's been to therapy.

So onto the next mystery animals found the hants is this. This is a very common sound. So it's not so much about the trick, isn't so much about who, but the time I mean is there.

By Yeah, I'm gonna say some kind of groundhog, a prairie dog or something.

Great. Yeah, well we will find out next time on Creature feature. If you think you know who is making that sound, you can write to me at Creature futurepod at gmail dot com. And Ellen, thank you so much for joining me today. You're always a delight. Where can people find you?

Of course they can find me on Just the Zoo of Us, which is a podcast on the Maximum Fun network where we review animals. We alternate between me and my husband doing our own notes and reporting our scores that we give the animals to each other. And then we have guest guest episodes where I bring on really cool people like Amani Weber Schultz, so I talked about earlier, who is a shark researcher who researches remras and shark denticles and stuff. So we have really cool people on. You can find it wherever you get podcasts or on maximum Fun dot org.

Nice. I thank you guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you leave a rating or review, that absolutely helps the show. I read every single one and thanks to the Space Classic score their super awesome song Exolumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio, four more poducts, four more podcasts like We Just Heard, Visit the iHeartRadio, app Apple Podcast, or Hey, guess what? Why have you listen to your favorite shows? Not? Your mother can't tell you, can't tell you how to live your life. You gotta gotta steer your own ship. See you next Wednesday,

Creature Feature

We take a critter’s eye view to explore how animal behavior parallels humans. Join comedians and sci 
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