Flying robot leaps upwards and then takes to the air like a bird

 

Joel Kontinen

A bird-inspired robot called RAVEN can walk, hop and jump into flight, an abFlying robot leaps upwards and then takes to the air like a birdility that could help people develop fixed-wing drones that can take off and land anywhere

Humans have recently made that can jump into the air like a bird this would eliminate the need for runways for small fixed winged drones.

“Birds use the powerful explosive force generated by their legs to leap into the air and start flying, but building a robot that can withstand the strong acceleration and forces involved in doing that has proved difficult. ”

This is a case for intelligent design. It relies also on biomimicry. Biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.

Now, Won Dong Shin at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) and his colleagues have built a flying propellered robot called RAVEN that can walk, hop and jump into the air to start flying, with legs that work like a bird’s.

“Fixed-wing vehicles, like airplanes, always require a runway or a launcher, which is not found everywhere. It really requires designated infrastructure to make an  airplane take off,” says Shin. “But if you see a bird, they just walk around, jump and take off. For them, it’s quite easy. They don’t need any external assistance.”

Unlike real birds’ legs, which have joints at the hip, knee and ankle, RAVEN’s legs have just two joints, at the hip and knee, that are powered by motors. There is also a spring in each foot that can store and release elastic energy. Using fewer components meant that Shin and his team could keep RAVEN to a weight of around 600 grams, similar to that of a crow.

Source: 

Alex Wilkins 2024 Flying robot leaps upwards and then takes to the air like a bird | New Scientist4 December

 

Heart-shaped mollusc has windows that work like fibre optics

 

Image courtesy of Dakota McCoy

Joel Kontinen

Tiny, solid windows in the shells of heart cockles let in light for the photosynthetic algae inside them – and they could show us how to make better fibre-optic cables.

This is a case for intelligent design, the molluscs item may be used for better fibre-optic cables. 

It relies also on biomimicry. Biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.

“A heart-shaped mollusc has evolved tiny windows that work like fibre-optic cables, the first known example in nature.”

The word evolved is an oxymoron. The species does not evolve, it develops it.

!Heart cockles (Corculum cardissa) are bivalve molluscs a bit like clams that have a symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic algae that live inside them. The algae have a safe home, get light to photosynthesise and provide nutrients for their hosts.

Unlike other bivalves, heart cockles don’t open their shells up wide, yet they somehow funnel light to their interior even while staying shut.

Now, Dakota McCoy at the University of Chicago and her colleagues have found that there are transparent calcium carbonate crystal structures in the heart cockle shells that function like fibre-optic bundles, letting light inside to bathe the algae. “If you don’t have to open and can just have a transparent window, that’s a very safe way to irradiate your algae,” says McCoy.”

Source:

 Alex Wilkins 2024 Heart-shaped mollusc has windows that work like fibre optics | New Scientist 19 November 

 

Bats are using an inspiration that could be used in robotics and autonomies vehicles, says researchers at Tel Aviv University.

 

Image courtesy of PD-USGov ,public domain.

Joel Kontinen

It is a technology based on echolocation, It relies on intelligent design and biomimicry.

Biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.

“While it’s well-known that bats use a natural sonar system to navigate by emitting sound waves and interpreting the returning echoes, previous research indicated that bats also rely on vision during flight,” researchers from Tel Aviv University and Tel Aviv’s Steinhardt Museum of Natural History said.

Echolocation is a biological sonar system used by certain animals, including bats, dolphins, and some birds, to navigate and locate objects in their environment by producing sound waves.

The study provides the first empirical evidence that bats construct such detailed acoustic maps in natural settings, which enhances our understanding of their complex sensory and cognitive abilities.

Source:

Pesach Benson, 2024  » Researchers Uncover Bat Navigation Secret That Could Transform Autonomous Vehicles 6 November.

Intelligent design treat can make a schrimp shoot very well

 

Gerald Robert Fischer/Shutterstock, 

Joel Kontinen

Shrimps protect themselves from shock waves by intelligent design They have a helmets to ward them off.  

 Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did,  He did very well.

New Scientist says that  “juvenile snapping shrimp have broken the acceleration record for a repeatable body movement underwater. The tiny crustaceans can snap their claws with an acceleration of nearly 600,000 metres per second squared – similar to that of a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun, " 

Bigclaw snapping shrimp (Alpheus heterochaelis), which can grow to several centimetres long, have spring-like mechanisms on the larger of their two claws.

Source:

 Offord,  Catherine, 2023. Young snapping shrimp’s tiny claws beat underwater acceleration record.  New Scientist.  28 February

 

 

Crab design in batteries

. 

Image courtesty of Colin Marshall/Alamy Stock Photo, 

Joel Kontinen  

A rechargeable battery made from crab shells and zinc could store wind and solar energy, and then its parts can either safely biodegrade within a matter of years or be recycled

This mystery  is chitosan, a compound derived from chitin, a substance found in crab and shrimp shells

Nowadays, ”lithium-ion batteries are the current standard, but their production requires mining lithium, which can damage the environment, and there are limited supplies of this metal.”+

This is a case for  biomimicry. 

biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did, He did very well.

Source;

Lesté-Lasserre, Christa. 2022.  Battery made of crab shell and zinc is rechargeable and biodegradable. New Scientist 1 September

Shrimps protect themselves by intelligent design

 

Image courtesy of  Crabby Taxonomist,  CC BY-NC-SA 2.0., 

Joel Kontinen 

Shrimps protect them from shock waves by intelligent design They have a helmets to ward them off, 

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did, He did very well.

Source;

Lesté-Lasserr, Christa, 2022. Snapping shrimps have helmets to ward off shock waves from their claws New Scientist  5 July. 

Drone to get an owl's tail

 

Image courtesy of Shantanu Kuveskar,CC BY-SA 4.0..

Joel Kontinen

Researches have studied the barn owl. They Suppose that giving a drone its  tail would make a drone more aerodynamic. 

Biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.- 

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did, He did very well.

Design in nature is so obvious that it’s practically impossible to deny it.

Source: 

Lesté-Lasserre, Christa. 2022. Giving drones barn owl-like tails may make them more efficient flyers New Scientist 9 February. 

Naturally strong but light, says researcher on character of knobby starfish

 

Image courtesy of Sesamehoneytart,  CC BY-SA 4.0.  

 

Joel Kontinen

"Cellular solids such as foams or honeycombs can exhibit excellent stiffness or toughness with minimal weight.

 Yang et al. examined ossicles, calcareous skeletal elements from the skeletons of knobby starfish Protoreaster nodosus

 The authors show that the structure consists of a dual-scale microlattice with both an atomic-level calcite and a micro-level diamond-triply periodic minimal surface, as well as gradients in composition and atomic level defects. It is these combined features that enhance the damage tolerance of the ossicles under compression, giving the starfish remarkable specific energy absorption capabilities."

Biomimicry or copying design features seen in living organisms has become a lucrative research field, as the originals are almost always better than what human engineers could have come up with.

Many other features in animals bear the hallmarks of intelligent design. A recent study looked at the zebra’s tail, which is also a very effective tool.

Other examples include the Saiga antelope’s air-conditioning nose, the penguin’s anti-free feathers and an anti-crash system in birds, to mention just a few.

Source:  

Yang, Yang  Et al, 2022. A damage-tolerant, dual-scale, single-crystalline microlattice in the knobby starfish, Protoreaster nodosus Science  10 February.  

Manta rays inspire new device to filter microplastics

Image courtesy of Shiyam ElkCloner, CC BY-SA 3.0. 

Joel kontinen

Manta Rays can digest microplastics that are a source of pollution in the seas. This speaks about the care of God, who wants everything to be as efficient as He created it to be,

It also speaks of  biomimicry, that is putting His World into action, 

Source: 

Manta rays inspire new device to filter microplastics BBC World Service. 27 September 2021.  

Robot Walks Like A Sea Slug’s Swimming Stroke

Image courtesy of Bernard Picton, CC BY- SA 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

Research published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say that humans have tried to get an underwater robot to walk like sea slug’s swimming stroke.

Nature research reported that

"Researchers led by Metin Sitti at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, sought to make soft robots that can move underwater. Inspired by the fluid motion of sea slugs, the scientists chose bending as the basis for their robot’s movements. They turned to liquid crystals as a basic material and light as a power source.

Sitti’s team introduced a plasticizer to a common type of liquid crystal, transforming it from a stiff substance into a flexible, soft gel. On illumination, long molecules that were lined up in loose rows within the gel splayed apart, forcing the gel to bend.

One robot walked some 65 millimetres on an underwater track in 108 seconds. Another propelled itself while bearing a thin frame roughly its own size."

Here their take on biomimetics or biomimicry.

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did, He did very well.

Source:

Soft robot takes cues from a sea slug’s swimming stroke. Nature. 2 March.
.

Insect Eyes Make Better Cameras

Image courtesy of S. Light. Fair use dialogue.




Joel Kontinen

Scientist in South Korea have build a camera an ultrathin insect eye camera. A research team by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(KAIST) research team led by Professor Jeong Ki-Hun demonstrated a fully packaged ultrathin insect eye camera.

“An insect's compound eye has superior visual characteristics such as wide viewing angle, high motion sensitivity, and large depth of field while maintaining a small volume of visual structure with a small focal length. Among them, Xenos peckii, an endoparasite of paper wasps, has eyes with hundreds of photoreceptors in a single lens—unlike conventional compound eyes with a few light-sensing cells in an individual eyelet. This unique structure offers higher visual resolution than other insect eyes. The Xenos peckii eye also perceives partial images through pigmented cups that block incoming light between eyelets.”

This is KAIST team’s take on biomimetics or biomimicry.

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did, He did very well.

Source:

Chinese Academy of Sciences. 2020. Biologically inspired ultrathin arrayed camera for high-contrast and high-resolution imaging Phys.Org. 3 March.

Flea Beetles Defy The Powers Of Gravity

Image courtesy of Beatriz Moisset, CC BY-SA 4.0.




Joel Kontinen

Flea beetles can jump. Their jumping skills can outperform the forces of gravity lies in their hind legs.

They can escape a predator archers with ease. Researched counted that they could jump 30 times at that speed.

“3D reconstructions and high-speed filming data, the scientists revealed that the acceleration during the jump can reach an explosive peak of 8,650 m/s2, which is 865 times the acceleration of gravity. The peak power output of the hind legs of the beetle peaked at 2.24 × 105 W/kg (per unit mass). This is about 450 times the capabilities of the fastest known muscle and 100~200 times that of a powerful rally car engine.”

“The fascinating and highly efficient jumping mechanism in flea beetles is described in a new research article in the open-access journal Zookeys. Despite having been known since 1929, the explosive jump – which is also the reason behind the colloquial name of this group of leaf beetles – has so far not been fully understood.”

”In conclusion, the scientists note that the catapulting jump mechanism in flea beetles is so efficient and yet so simple that it might find an excellent use in robotics, as well as in engineering and industrial installations. In their research paper, they also propose a design of a bionic limb inspired by the studied beetles.”

Biomimicry is a way that animals perform skills that humans can use in their research.


Source:

Pensoft Editorial Team, 2020, Exceptional catapulting jump mechanism in a tiny beetle could be applied in robotic limbs. Pensoft 25 February,




,

Hippos Act Like Silicon Pumps

Image courtesy of Matthias Kabel, CC BY-SA 3.0).



Joel Kontinen



Hippos eat grass and they then they defecating it in the water. They are acting like living silicon pumps. Each hippos eat around 40 kilograms of grass and other plants rich in silicon dioxide – also known as silica – only to spend the following day lazing around in the water where they digest and excrete it.

Jonas Schoelynck and his colleagues in studied the silicon levels in a hippo-dominated ecosystem in south-western Kenya. In one 250-metre stretch of river Mara, they found 80 hippos.

“Hippos act as a kind of conveyor belt, transporting silica from land to water,” says Schoelynck.

The research was reported in Science Advances.

Hippos have been driven from Lake Victoria. If populations shrink further, the amount of silicon pumped into waterways will diminish, and the important plants and fish there could be in jeopardy, says the team.

This kind of stuff does not evolve on its own. It needs a process, a mind to start it. This is a call for God, who ordained everything the right way.

Source:

Prosser Scully, Ruby. 2019. Hippos poop a huge amount of silicon every day – and it’s a good thing, New Scientist (1 May).

This Crafty Spider Doesn't Have Venom...But It Does Have a 'Slingshot'

Image courtesy of Judy Gallagher, CC BY 2.0.




Joel Kontinen

Spiders can be fast. just a reminder of how one species - triangle weaver spider (Hyptiotes cavatus) does it.

It uses "external power amplification” to do the trick. “Basically, an animal uses an external device (in this case, the spider's web) to store energy, like a person storing energy in a bow with a pulled-back arrow. Once the energy is released, the spider is flung forward like a slingshot, greatly exceeding the speeds at which the arachnid could otherwise travel.”

Then it says how they did the trick:

"To study the critter, the scientists collected wild triangle weaver spiders, which are native to the United States and Canada, and brought them to the lab, where the spiders were housed in terrariums and filmed with high-speed videos as they hunted prey.

Daniel Maksuta, a doctoral student studying polymer science at the University of Akron in Ohio says. "It really works out too. [If] the prey is massive in comparison to the web and the spider, the web kind of just flings around it. So, that's how [the prey] gets all tangled up."

The maneuver is so fast, the spider can be hurled forward at accelerations of about 772 meters squared (2,535 feet/second squared).

Animals can do all kinds of tricks. For instance, the tiny crustaceans can live in the depths of the sea. And, frog choruses inspire wireless sensor networks.

Thus, biomimetrics or biomimicry or copying amazing design seen in nature has recently become a success.

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2019.This Crafty Spider Doesn't Have Venom...But It Does Have a 'Slingshot' Live Science (16.5.).

How Tiny Crustaceans Survive The Mariana Trench

Hirondellea gigas. Image courtesy of Russ Hopcroft. public domain.






Joel Kontinen

Hirondellea gigas dwells at the bottom of the sea — the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, some 10,911 meters (35,797 feet) down.

This species could not in live so difficult circumstances. However, “Japanese scientists find this crustacean survives the deep sea by using aluminum armor.”

This study was reported in the journal PLOS ONE, in the recent issue (April 4).

Study lead author Hideki Kobayashi also has an Biomimicry or biomimetics attitude. He say that “this newfound biological process might one day lead to an environmentally friendly way to produce aluminum."


The Biomimicry or biomimetics also includes our bones.


Source:

Choi, Charles Q. How Tiny Crustaceans Survive the Crushing Pressures of the Mariana Trench. Live Science (8 May).

Frog Choruses Inspire Wireless Sensor Networks

Image courtesy of Brian Gratwicke, CC BY 2.0. CC BY 2.0.



Joel Kontinen

Darwinian evolution does not look ahead. It does
not do any planning. So, where does the very effective design that we see in nature come from?

Biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.

Here’s a Phys.org story about frogs.

“If you've ever camped by a pond, you know frogs make a racket at night; but what you might not know is how functional and regulated their choruses really are. Frogs communicate with sound, and amid their ruckus is an internally orchestrated system that lets information get through more clearly while also permitting collective choruses and time to rest. Researchers from Osaka University and University of Tsukuba sought to leverage this amphibious acumen for mathematical and technological aims. “

The story also says;

"We found neighboring frogs avoided temporal overlap, which allows a clear path for individual voices to be heard," study co-author Daichi Kominami explains. "In this same way, neighboring nodes in a sensor network need to alternate the timings of data transmission so the data packets don't collide."

Source:

Osaka University.2019. Frog choruses inspire wireless sensor networks Phys.org (21 January).

Biomimicry: Mantis Schrimps Punch with The Force of a Bullet

Image courtesy of Silke Baron, CC BY 2.0.



Joel Kontinen

Intelligent design in nature is so evident that it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny it. In recent years, researchers have copied many amazing designs they have seen in the animal kingdom.

A case for intelligent design is the mantis shrimp, that has many users.

The mantis shrimp smashes its victims’ shells with the force of a .22 caliber bullet. “But that’s not because it has particularly powerful muscles – instead of big biceps, it has arms that are naturally spring-loaded, allowing it to swing its fistlike clubs to speeds up to 23 metres per second.”

“The key part of a mantis shrimp’s punch is a saddle-shaped structure on the arm just above the shrimp’s club. This shape works a bit like a bow and arrow, says Ali Miserez at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore: the muscles pull on the saddle to bend it like an archer’s bow, and when it is released that energy transfers into the club.”

“The shrimp’s saddle holds all that energy without snapping. They found that it works because of a two-layer structure. The top layer is made of a ceramic material similar to bone, and the bottom is made of mostly plastic-like biopolymers.

When the saddle is bent, the top layer gets compressed and the bottom layer is stretched. The ceramic can hold a lot of energy when it is compressed, but is brittle when bent and stretched. The biopolymers are stronger and stretchier, so they hold the whole thing together.”

This isn’t something that Darwin’s blind watchmaker, natural selection, works, in that the shrimp’s punch may be useful in microrobots.

Biomimicry is a science that bring out that what God has designed. And what he did, He did very well.

Source:

Crane, Leah. 2018. Mantis shrimps punch with the force of a bullet – and now we know how. New Scientist (18 October).

The Fractal-Like Structure of Human Bone Speaks of Intelligent Design

Collagen in bone looks like this, but there’s much more in our bones. Image courtesy of Sbertazzo, CC BY-SA 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

When French engineer Gustave Eiffel designed the tower that bears his name, he copied the structure of the human femur.

Last year (2017) Science reported on an invention called supersteel that is based on human bone.

The bone’s inner structure makes it both lightweight and hardy. For a similar reason pterosaurs were efficient fliers - and birds still are.

Recently, Science published a paper by Roland Kröger of the University of York and colleagues at Imperial College London. They used electron microscopes to look at the nanostructure of human bone.

“The authors believe that the fractal-like structure of bone is one of the key reasons for its remarkable attributes,” Science Daily concludes.

Fractals are seen everywhere in nature. They suggest that there’s nothing haphazard in creation, but every detail is designed carefully.

The Science Daily article elaborates:

“Besides the large number of nested structures in bone, a common feature of all of them is a slight curvature, providing twisted geometry. To name a few, the mineral crystals are curved, the protein strands (collagen) are braided, the mineralized collagen fibrils twist, and the entire bones themselves have a twist, such as those seen in the curving shape of a rib for example.”

This does not look like the work of the blind watchmaker that our old friend Richard Dawkins used to be so fond of.

Source:

University of York. 2018. Revealing the remarkable nanostructure of human bone. Science Daily. (3 May).

Amazingly Strong Eggshells Defy Darwinian Explanations

It’s an elegantly designed temporary home. Image courtesy of KDS4444, CC BY-SA 4.0.





Joel Kontinen

Chicken eggs are elegantly designed temporary homes. They protect the inhabitants (if we can call them that) from harm and yet let them breath.

They also seem to be able to tell the birdling when it’s time to set out into the wider world.

Eggs have three main layers. A new study published in the journal Science Advances suggests that the eggshells’ nanostructure “appears to play a key role in the strength of the shell.”

As quoted in The Guardian, study co-author Professor Marc McKee (McGill University in Canada) says that eggshells, although thin, can be harder than some metals.

But when the time is right, the chick can crack the shell open.

The almost magical ingredient is a protein called osteopontin. The hardness of the shell depends on the distribution of osteopontin in the various layers of the eggshell.

Unfortunately, Professor McKee fails to give credit to whom credit is due:

“When you think about it, we should be making materials that are inspired by nature and by biology because, boy, it is really hard to beat hundreds of millions of years of evolution in perfecting something.”

The problem with Darwinian mechanisms is that they are incapable of top-down planning that is seen everywhere in creation.

Source:

Davis, Nicola. 2018. Scientists solve eggshell mystery of how chicks hatch. The Guardian (30 March).

Scallops’ Eye Works Like A Telescope, Inspires Better Optical Devices

Image courtesy of Rachael Norris and Marina Freudzon, Public Domain.




Joel Kontinen

Scallops are anything but simple creatures. They have “200 eyes that function remarkably like a telescope, using living mirrors to focus light,” an article posted on Phys.org says, reporting on a recent paper published in the journal Science.

Researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science and Lund University in Sweden found out these animals have “a mosaic of tiny mirrors and crystals, carefully arranged inside scallops' small poppy seed-like eyes which line their outer edge, known as the mantle.

Each mirror is layered, reflecting wavelengths of light in their habitat and giving them a spatial view of their surroundings.”

And there’s more.

“Each mirror is also ‘tiled with a mosaic of square-shaped crystals, minimizing surface defects for a clearer picture,’ the Science report said.

‘The mirror forms images on a double-layered retina, to separately image both peripheral and central fields of view.’ "

The research also has a biomimicry dimension: Engineers might use this complex system to design better optical devices.

The animal kingdom is full of intelligently designed features or solutions that cannot be explained away by Darwinian mechanisms.

Source:

Phys.org. 2017. Scallops have 200 eyes, which function like a telescope: study (30 November)-