Home | Community | Message Board

Avalon Magic Plants
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: North Spore Cultivation Supplies   Original Sensible Seeds Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds, Bulk Cannabis Seeds

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
InvisibleDiploidM
Cuban

Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 01/09/03
Posts: 19,274
Loc: Rabbit Hole
Insect Flight Research Could Advance Technology
    #5073130 - 12/16/05 08:13 PM (18 years, 5 months ago)

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97651&page=1

The ordinary fruit fly can change the direction of its flight by 90 degrees in about 50-thousandths of a second, a feat that has long puzzled scientists and bedazzled engineers who, it turns out now, were mistaken in their understanding of how Drosophila melanogaster performs that magical maneuver.

Until now, it had been thought that the fly uses air friction generated by its flapping wings to change its direction at an astonishing rate of 2000 degrees per second.

But new research shows the animal is far more sophisticated than that. It uses torque to rotate its body in the direction it wants to go and then flaps its wings furiously to speed off in the new direction.

The maneuver is analogous to a hovering helicopter that rotates from north to west, and then zips westward. Tiny critters weren't supposed to be able to do that.

"But the fly has to do this whole little ballet in about one-fifth the blink of a human eye, and the only way it's capable of doing that is with some rather spiffy neuro-circuitry," says Michael Dickinson, professor of bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Dickinson's lab, equipped with sophisticated video equipment, has caught the fly in the act, and the images show its intricate maneuvers in great detail, according to research published recently in the journal Science.

Dickinson is a leader in the field of insect flight, and his motivation for the research is pretty basic.

"Figuring out how the world works is motivation enough," he says.


Toward Tiny Flying Spies

But there's more to it than that. Scientists are increasingly looking at the world of plants and animals to solve some of our most pressing problems, and the lowly fly could play a critical role in that effort.

Dickinson is working with physicists and engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop tiny robots that could fly through the air like a fly, and perform some task that might be too dangerous for humans.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and other labs around the world, are plowing that same field and have actually built some robots that mimic the movements of insects. Someday, it may be possible to send these mechanical devices into a building, or onto a battlefield, to sniff out chemical or biological hazards before the first humans enter the area.

If scientists can figure out exactly how the fly works its magic, Dickinson says, they will be much closer to realizing that goal.

"For every problem, there is a model system out there that's well suited for it, and by studying animals that have to make a living by understanding complicated physics, we can gain a lot of insight," he says.


A Mighty Mini-Model of Motion

It's hard to find a better example than the fly.

"It has the fastest visual system on the planet, and the most powerful muscles on the planet," he says. "And it's all being coordinated by a brain the size of a sesame seed."

The power-to-mass ratio is great enough for the fly to master flight, "the most costly form of locomotion [in terms of energy]," Dickinson says.

No wonder his research assistant, Rosalyn Sayaman, has become so awed by flies that she says she "can't even swat them anymore."

Such a complex biological system lends itself well to Dickinson's field of research.

"I'm interested in how brains work," he says. "Flies are a very important model for understanding how brains process information, and what a brain has to do is critically dependent on the physics of the fly's motion itself."


Flight Lessons

Using three cameras, the researchers created three-dimensional images of flies inside a large free flight arena, which they dubbed the Fly-O-Rama. It had been thought that flies performed quite differently than larger flying critters, like birds.

But the videos show that a fly that wants to change its direction first accelerates, then goes into a banked turn like a bird, then accelerates again on the new course. But instead of using aerodynamic drag, like an airplane, to change its direction of flight, it somehow rotates itself through the generation of torque. And that's somewhat of a physiological achievement. Try jumping up into the air and twisting, and yet stopping the twisting motion at exactly the right moment.

"How does it [the fly] make the decision that it's turned enough, and it's now time to start counter-turning?" Dickinson asks. "It is rotating so fast that its visual system is blind during the rotation."

And it does all that within an extraordinarily short period of time.

Dickinson thinks there might be many applications for that technology, if we can just figure out how the fly does it. Those little pests might be able to teach us a lot, and many scientists have picked up on that theme.

"There's an old principle in physiology," Dickinson says. "If you want to understand something, study an animal that does it really well."


--------------------
Republican Values:

1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you.
2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child.
3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer.

4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineRandolph_Carter
НơĻ?ĢΉō

Registered: 06/13/00
Posts: 29,281
Loc: Shroomery B-list.
Last seen: 14 years, 2 days
Re: Insect Flight Research Could Advance Technology [Re: Diploid]
    #5075676 - 12/17/05 03:49 PM (18 years, 5 months ago)

I'm always amazed at the stuff they're learning from insects....
like that one article a while back about preying mantis' and how they avoided bats.


--------------------
"..all those molecules thrashing their kinky little tails, hot for destiny and the street."  Gibson


Nuke baby seals for Jesus!

(This has been a +1 production.)

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: North Spore Cultivation Supplies   Original Sensible Seeds Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds, Bulk Cannabis Seeds


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* NASA research team successfully flies first laser-powered ai wingnutx 1,702 6 10/11/03 03:28 AM
by Le_Canard
* technological telepathy? psychomime 1,279 11 09/15/05 05:33 AM
by ummikko
* new gun technology spudamore 1,313 13 08/30/05 04:37 AM
by RuNE
* Researchers Study Formation Of Chemical Precursors to Life Occuring in Space DiploidM 729 0 08/08/06 08:56 PM
by Diploid
* Northwestern Researchers Look at Hydrogen Fuel in a New Way Catalysis 1,812 18 04/09/05 07:02 PM
by MarioNett
* We are all using alien technology!
( 1 2 all )
mantis 4,330 31 08/02/03 12:07 AM
by ricyjo
* Isn't anyone else interested in SCIENCE or TECHNOLOGY? Just call this the computer forum.. freddurgan 2,450 15 02/09/05 12:01 AM
by Vvellum
* Researchers Explore Scrapping Internet Le_Canard 921 2 04/17/07 04:01 PM
by Nephlyte

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: trendal, automan, Northerner
549 topic views. 0 members, 0 guests and 1 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.017 seconds spending 0.004 seconds on 12 queries.