[dead]
The electrostatic world of insects
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: The electrostatic world of insects
#42"They were using a toy wand that gathers static charge to levitate lightweight objects, such as a balloon." -- How much science progresses through play.
Re: The electrostatic world of insects
#43>spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky
I did some amateur research on spider ballooning many years ago and I believe part of the lift comes from rising air dragging along the silk thread. From my calculations, it wasn't enough to lift the spider on its own, but it might allow the spider to fall slower than the convective air currents were rising.
Re: The electrostatic world of insects
#44> The magic of animal electrostatics is all about size. Large animals don’t meaningfully experience nature’s static—we’re too big to feel it. “As humans, we are living mostly in a gravitational or fluid-dynamics world,” Ortega-Jiménez said. But for tiny beings, gravity is an afterthought. Insects can feel air’s viscosity. While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of f…
Similar to this, one of the most mind-blowing papers I’ve read was Life at Low Reynold’s Number about how at the microorganism level water is virtually solid and inertia does not exist. https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf https://swizec.com/blog/week-9-life-at-low-reynolds-number/
When you are very big (like an elephant), gravity is all important and surface tension barely matters.
When you are very small (like an ant), it is the other way around.
Toss a mouse from a building. It will land, shake itself off and scamper away. But if similarly dropped, “… a rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” So wrote J.B.S. Haldane in his 1926 essay "On Being the Right Size." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27082
Re: The electrostatic world of insects
#45but if anybody regular worries about the (quite new) abundance of EM radiation one's the nutjob
We've always lived amongst abundant EM radiation.
Re: The electrostatic world of insects
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your pokemon example predates any of this research by a few years and so it certainly wouldn't have been known by the creators. It's a coincidence.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140114113339.h...
Yeah, that's after the pokemon you mentioned debuted. You're just proving my point.
Re: The electrostatic world of insects
#47Re: The electrostatic world of insects
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've always lived amongst abundant EM radiation.
Not the man made kind, which are different from natural sources and greatly increase the background EM fields we live in.
EM radiation is defined by it's wavelength and amplitude. Whether it is from a 'natural' source is completely irrelevant in terms of the effect it has.
I guess humans have changed the mix of wavelength we are exposed to a bit. E.g. more RF radiation from phones and base stations. But I'm not sure how significant those changes are in the overall 'background EM fields we live in'.
Re: The electrostatic world of insects
#49Really interesting article. Highlights something I think is so cool but have a hard time really articulating: how even within our own 3+1 dimensions, just changing your scale is an entirely different experience.
Some forces are O(n^2). Other are ratios between volume and mass.
Also there are critical points. You can't have any arbitrary mass of hydrogen in space, at some point it collapses ant starts to burn.
Re: The electrostatic world of insects
#50but if anybody regular worries about the (quite new) abundance of EM radiation one's the nutjob
The way I understand it, there is one EM field and photons of various frequencies travel in that field: radio, microwave, infra-red, visible, ultra-violet, x-ray, gamma.
We are awash with EM radiation of almost all frequencies from the universe. A little 5G probably isn't our biggest problem.
Besides, this article is more about electo-static forces, and how, when you're very small, these are much more significant than the gravitational force, which makes sense.