Mostly, the cockroach invokes disgust, maybe fear, but hardly ever inspiration. We recoil when these insects emerge from gaps and crevices they have no business being in. But, ever wondered how they manage to slink through thin gaps in the first place? Well, some scientists did and they performed a particularly macabre experiment to understand this cockroach superpower - they loaded the suckers onto a plate and compressed the living hell out of them.
They found that cockroaches have an exoskeleton made up of origami-like stacked plates that lend it both hardness and flexibility, allowing the cockroaches to withstand massive weights ~ 300-900 times their own. At the same time, it enables a cockroach to seemingly shrink into spaces a quarter of its height and efficiently leverage friction to scurry about whilst compressed. To put this into perspective, imagine moving at a speed of ~ 100 km/hr while carrying a load of 200 tonnes on your head, as the ceiling descends on you. The humble cockroaches’ ability to quickly navigate tight spaces is unrivaled, a truly awesome blend of shape-shifting and speed. Oh, and the study did indeed inspire the design of better soft-robots along with wisdom on how to get rid of cockroaches - slam the shoe hard and hold it down.
I am endlessly fascinated by how animals evolve awesome abilities to survive and thrive in the wild. Take, for instance, the pacy peregrine falcon - the fastest living creature that makes mid-air dives at the speeds of an F1 car at full throttle. Peregrine falcons have a whole trove of modifications for executing bullet swoops. In this piece for The Wire, I wrote about these modifications and how the dives aren’t just daredevil stunts but might be an optimal hunting strategy.
On the other side of the predator-prey dynamic, lies the humble hagfish that has one of the coolest defense mechanisms. When almost snagged by a shark, the hagfish releases an explosion of slime that chokes it. In the resulting pandemonium, the hagfish escapes and goes on living, as it has been in more or less the same shape and form for almost 300 million years. Ed Yong wrote an amazing piece on the Hagfish with a knockout lede about the slime.
It expands by 10,000 times in a fraction of a second, it’s 100,000 times softer than Jell-O, and it fends off sharks and Priuses alike.
I wrote a piece in The Wire on Hagfish slime too, in particular, discussing fluid-mechanics modeling efforts to understand how the slime expands as fast as it does. While the hagfish employ the “attack is the best defense” strategy to good use, a few creatures have less active, less violent, but no less awesome abilities.
Tiny transparent amphipods (look like sand fleas) populate the deep sea, maintaining near invisibility. But, in the same way a transparent glass is visible in the dark under a burst of light, these amphipods suffer contrast enhancement under incoming searchlight emanating from a deep-sea predator. As a counter, these creatures have a thin homogenous carpet of spherical projections that smoothen the refraction of light and act as anti-reflection films. The kicker - the film is believed to be a carpet of bacteria, living on its host in seeming harmony. I wrote about this in The Wire in a collaborative piece.
While scientists have been trying to use an array of materials for obtaining efficient anti-reflective properties in the hopes of designing an invisibility cloak, maybe we must turn our lenses to nature, which has often provided us with the easiest answers.
Recently, scientists discovered special arrangements on the wings of two moth species. Their scales are a finely tuned design that significantly blocks out sound waves of a broad frequency range. Why would they want to do that? Obviously, to evade bats that hunt by echolocation. So, moths indeed have some sort of an acoustic metamaterial on their wings. And, it seems that in the search for a lightweight solution for sound absorption too, nature seems to have provided us with an answer.
But, arguably my favorite example of a creature tapping into a weird and wonderful ability to further its existence, is the tale of the Robin, a small migratory bird. Robins detect the Earth’s weakly changing magnetic field as a guiding mechanism for its journeys. Research built over decades suggests that the Robins internal magnetic compass is no ordinary one, it’s quantum nature. The ordinary Robin is now a poster child for the burgeoning field of Quantum Biology.
As shameless as these plug-ins of pieces I’ve written over the years are, I admittedly harbor an almost giddy awe for stories like these that occupy the continuum between whacky, whimsical, and plain bad-ass. David Hu, a researcher at Georgia Tech wrote a wonderful book about the physics behind some of these stories. In my review of his book - How To Walk on Water and Climb Walls I wrote,
As an accessible, if sometimes clunky, account of cutting-edge research, it is good. As a reminder that the next big discovery could come from the cockroach in your kitchen or the mosquito in your bedroom – and maybe not from a supercollider or a space telescope – it is great.
There is much value in trying to gain a mechanistic understanding of how the natural world functions. The meter of evolution has been running for a long time, much longer than mankind, and scientific innovation came to be. Then, it’s not outlandish that nature beats us in some of these games of sculpting machines. In the review, I also wrote,
We often dismiss the curiosities of the animal kingdom as wonders, with a fleeting moment of appreciation. Most of us remain reluctant to penetrate the surface and unravel the sleights of hand below. If only we did, we’d find that there is no magic. That everything – whether a strider or a mechanical water-walker – is guided by the same laws.
I want to renege. It doesn’t matter if we got stuff figured out. Physics be damned. If birds hacking into quantum entanglement isn’t magic, I don’t quite know what is.
Here are some recommendations for the week -
I absolutely loved Ted Lasso. As a TV-series, it’s a perfect antidote to the pandemic and its accompanying times. It invokes the same wholesome comfort that Schitt’s Creek so wonderfully channeled. Ted Lasso demonstrates the fragility and resistance of humanity with daring brevity and heart.
In the enjoyable Pundits of Pakistan, Rahul Bhattacharya recounts the memorable India vs Pakistan cricket series of 2004. Part travelogue and part cricket-writing, the book is a keenly observed look at the cricket frenzy in India and Pakistan, as well as a fun joy ride through the many cities of Pakistan that hosted the Indian cricket team.
Two long-reads: Douglas Preston tells the eerie story of a set of bones found high-up in the Himalayas and how scientists have been trying to solve the mystery in ‘The Skeletons at the Lake’. Samanth Subramanian did a very interesting deep dive into the world of public toilet hygiene - ‘Hand dryers v paper towels: the surprisingly dirty fight for the right to dry your hands’.
This Arijit Singh song from Sonchiriya (tragically under-watched) is hauntingly rendered and flew completely under the radar - Rua Rua. As did Rekha Bhardwaj’s beautiful song from Dedh Ishqiya - Ab Mujhe Koi.
This video from one of my favorite YouTube creators Vinit Masram deconstructs the genius of A.R Rahman and his excellent background score for Bombay.
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