An insect that has the only mechanical gears ever found in nature (2013)
smithsonianmag.comReminds me of this pretty common but all the more spectacular: a close-up of super complex production line (gene transcription) driven by DNA strands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY / https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/7Hk9jct2ozY
Thanks for posting that. It truly is mind blowing. It makes my head hurt just thinking about how life exists and it all starting with this insanity. In computing, there's this idea of a machine that could make itself, an idea Von Neumann toyed with. And yet, here is life, which figured it out billions (if not more) years ago. Makes you wonder just what in the hell is going on in this universe.
That video is seriously cool. Thanks again.
What you posted is so cool! And look at ATP synthase! wow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXpzp4RDGJI
These vids always make me want to eat healthier and exercise. Don’t want to let my little subcelular machines down after all this work:(
Youtube recommended a talk by the animator, which is fascinating:
I was just thinking about this. Does folding your hands count as a gear? The interlocked fingers make for a tighter grasp. When viewed from the palm side they even look like a gear. It is not the natural state of the hands but many gears also spend time in an unmeshed state. What is the definition of a gear anyway?
Not an expert, but I feel like interlocking your hands does not count because the definition of a gear includes rotation, and transmission of motion. Interlocked hands don't rotate and they don't transmit motion.
Interlocking hands seems to me to be about grip strength. Sometimes it's easier to grip your other hand by interlocking than it is to grip the object you're lifting.
Then the "gear" from this insect would also not count as it does not transfer motion. Its more like a joint that has teeth for extra grip.
> an intricate gearing system that locks their back legs together, allowing both appendages to rotate at the exact same instant
That sounds like transmission of motion to me?
If I lock my hands together, rotating one of my wrists also rotates the other wrist. I'm not saying it's a _useful_ transfer of motion though!
Only if one leg is pushing the other leg
> To confirm that the gears performed this function, the researchers performed a neat (albeit morbid) trick with some dead Issus. They manually cocked their legs back in a jumping position, then electrically stimulated the main jumping muscle in one leg so that the leg extended. Because it was rotationally locked by the gears, the other non-stimulated leg moved as well, and the dead insect jumped forward.
If we had never invented gears, but somehow had invented microscopes, we might've eventually stumbled on this insect and gotten the idea for mechanical gears from observing its legs.
What other things on the technology tree did we skip over and might we discover out in some insect, bird or fish?
We still don't know how tiny insect brains are capable of using so little energy to do so much navigation and learning+memory, right?
>What other things on the technology tree did we skip over and might we discover out in some insect, bird or fish?
Or beyond that, what fundamental physics principles have we somehow missed? Perhaps faster-than-light travel is actually really simple, and we somehow just haven't discovered it yet. Meanwhile, some much more primitive civilization elsewhere has, and is going to invade us soon with their FTL spaceships armed with... cannons equivalent to our Medieval weapons. They'll be in for a big surprise when we shoot back with guided missiles.
Cells. Interlinked.
A tall white fountain played.
You're not even close to baseline!
The linked video is from 2013
Previously:
2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6376191 (183 comments)
2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8212984 (10 comments)
Ok, we've changed to that from https://canyouactually.com/first-mechanical-gear-ever-found-.... Thanks!