An insect that has the only mechanical gears ever found in nature (2013) • Hacker News Board

Re: An insect that has the only mechanical gears ever found in nature (2013)

#21

Post by hombre_fatal » Mon, Mar 27, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #7

Reminds 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

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:(

Re: An insect that has the only mechanical gears ever found in nature (2013)

#22

Post by rantallion » Mon, Mar 27, 2023, 3:17 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #20

zimpenfish wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

Re: An insect that has the only mechanical gears ever found in nature (2013)

#23

Post by unsupp0rted » Mon, Mar 27, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

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?

Re: An insect that has the only mechanical gears ever found in nature (2013)

#24

Post by midoridensha » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 8:28 AM UTC

unsupp0rted wrote: post #23

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+memo…

>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.