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I was thinking about these two options a lot recently, after I read two books in a row that were basically about humanity struggle to come to terms with the end of the world. One, Elizabeth Kolbert The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, was a beautifully-written elegy for the many spec
stanley cup ies on Earth that humans have destroyed 鈥?and a sad prophesy that we are doomed to destroy so many more that eventually we will kill off two-thirds of the life on our planet in a mass extinction event. The other was a rather cheerful book by Lewis Dartnell, called The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, which dealt with how we ;d loot cities to rebuild civilization in the wake of a pandemic. There is a certain amount of dark glee in Dartnell account, where he begins by ex
stanley cup plaining we ;ll have to throw the social contract out the window, before we get down to forging our own weapons and restarting the calendar system. Both Kolbert and Dartnell are convinced that we ;re facing some kind of devastating, global scenario, whether it from a slow-burning mass extinction or a fast-traveling deadly disease. But their tactics for dealing with this information are very different. Watch It All Die The apocalypse that Kolbert describes is very likely already underway. She carefully explains that
stanley cup extinction rates among animals are far above the norm 鈥?among certain groups, like amphibians, it may be 44 thousand times higher than the ty Mykh This Aston Martin Android Isn t Up to 007鈥瞫 Specifications
This makes sense. Other animals make soft landings by using the inertia from swinging appendages or through the flapping of wings. Jumping spiders, it now appears, do this with their silk lines. Kai-jung Chi and colleagues analyzed the jumping ability of Adanson house spider by filming their jumps at 1,000 frames per second. The researchers watched as the spiders used their draglines to control bodily orientation. Fascinatingly, the spiders were
stanley termosy able to make super-fast adjustments to the draglines slack by controlling the valve in their spinning system. Without silk, upright-landing spiders would slip or even tumble, deferring completion of landing, write the researchers. Indeed, the researchers also looked at non-silk jumping spiders, who typically lost their balance and tipped forward onto their backs after a precarious landing: Intriguingly, the new insight could assist in the development of maneuverable robots. Hmm, jumping robotic spiders. Sounds legit. Read the entire study at the Royal Society journal, Interface: More than a safety line: jump-stabilizing silk of salticids. Image: National Chung Hsing University. BiologyScienceSpidersZoology
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