I really hate to do this, but some people have been taking whole chunks of my blog and publishing them as theirs, or implying I endorse their products.
Not cool.
This work protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. You are not allowed to just take content from my site. You DO NOT have permission to scrape my feed or content excerpts as part of a Splog or commercial website.
If you want to use my work for commercial purposes, contact me. I'm happy to have you use my work, I just want to be asked.
One of the many cool things that came out of ScienceOnline2012 was a meme-thingy called “IamScience”. From Mindy, who created the video below:
“On January 27, 2012, science writer and marine biologist Kevin Zelnio started the Twitter hashtag #IamScience, encouraging scientists to share their individual stories about their traditional or unconventional paths that brought them to where they were today. The response was overwhelming, with hundreds of tweets pouring in over just a few days.
I’ve collected and excerpted just a handful of them, and set them to Reckless Kelly’s “Wicked Twisted Road”, a song that Kevin mentioned in his original post as holding particular significance for his own path toward science.
You can see a storify of most of the tweets for #IamScience; or you can watch this video. Get Kleenex.
“Magical things can happen when you enthusiastically open your mouth on the internet. One of these magical things is learning how personal experience shapes people’s lives. Looking into others causes you to look into yourself. And then something really magical happens – we learn we are not alone.” –Kevin Zelnio
Want to make the project bigger? Kevin has offered to put things together in an e-book:
I would like to curate a free e-book of submissions from people about their experiences – good and bad, whatever you are willing to share. Put your name on it or keep it anonymous, doesn’t matter, but people need to hear how your experiences in the past shaped who you are today and what you do.
If you are interested in participating in this project, I’d love to hear from you. Please email me at kzelnio at gmail dot com. Submissions are whatever is necessary for you to tell your story, up to 5000 words. Include drawing, sketchpads, poetry, whatever you need to tell your story.
Ben Lillie’s story is right after mine, and is very different, and incredibly powerful. I got a little verklempt. Ben now runs The StoryCollider, which is an amazing project to collect science stories.
I had been mentally drafting something about storytelling and science, but then Emily at This View of Life wrote something so spot on in summary of ScienceOnline I defer to her:
“I think that this tendency to focus on the sexy or the gross, the morbid or the taboo, is not just a symptom of our four days of very little sleep, more than a little alcohol in some cases and a deep sense of intellectual and cultural overstimulation.
No, this is an integral part of who we are as a group. We focus on duck penises because we almost have to.
We are all story tellers, whether scientists, journalists or educators. We take data and create hypotheses. We take facts and construct narratives. We take a curriculum and transform it into inspiration.
I’ll try to put together a more meaningful summary of the Science Online conference later this week, but for the moment I’m enjoying the accomplishment of briefly trending on Twitter. Even if it is for telling a story about Seamonkeys in your Pants.
You might have noticed a lot of news lately about robot designs based on insects. Insects are great models for robots because bugs have an extremely stable and efficient model of locomotion: the tripod gait. At any time, roaches have 3 feet on the ground–even when they’re running. This tripod structure makes insects extra-resistant to tripping or tipping over.
Biomimeticsis the fancy name for engineering systems that copy principles found in nature. Basing robots that need to scamper over rough terrain on an insect model that’s successfully lasted millions of years makes a lot of sense. But just how, exactly, do insects keep all those legs going in the right direction? How can they respond so quickly to an approaching rolled-up newspaper? How do insects manage this advanced scuttling with such a tiny brain? And how can insects keep running even after their head is removed?
(Yes, insects can live for quite a while without a head. They eventually die from dehydration or starvation because they can’t drink or eat anymore, but remain able to run away and respond to environmental stimuli. It’s really quite disturbing.)
In order to build a biomimetic robot, one has to first understand the mechanics at work in insects. The engineering explanation for insect locomotion is hidden in equations about viscoelastic spring mass oscillation and tiny insect-mounted cannons.
This is not a photoshopped picture; it’s from a 2002 research paper in which researchers attempted to mathematically work out the principles of roach locomotion. You can see the jet-pack at work in this movie:
So. Um, WHY did they put jetpacks on roaches? Aside from it just being a totally freakin’ COOL thing to do?
Remember I mentioned how stable the tripod gait is? The researchers suspected that the roach wasn’t using just its brain to keep itself balanced and running. They created a mathematical model of a roach with legs that were springs.
Just the mechanical properties of springy legs were able to explain how a roach kept on track and at full speed, despite obstacles. They called these “preflexive” mechanisms, to indicate that the exoskeleton and muscles stabilize roaches without involvement of the nervous system.
They had an explanation on paper, with a lot of big words and calculations of lateral velocity. The next step was to test their lovely model by poking a roach while it was running. That…was about as difficult to do as you might imagine, based on your experience chasing roaches around your kitchen.
The researchers needed to have a precisely measured force disturbing the roaches, so that they could plug it into their model and see if it was accurate. Hence, a tiny exploding cannon mounted on a roach. Or, to give it the gizmo it’s proper name, the rapid impulsive perturbation (RIP) device. (That name is doubly clever, since they were experimenting with the death’s head cockroach, Blaberus discoidalis.)
They calculated the lateral force generated by the RIP explosion was equal to 85% of the insect’s forward motion. If you were jogging along, and I ran into you with a force that was 85% of your forward momentum, I don’t think either of us would be standing up. (Ok, yes, there’s mass involved in this too, but just work with me here.) The roaches hardly even break stride. In fact, it took just 13 miliseconds for a roach to begin to respond to the explosion and get back on track. The roaches completely recovered from that RIP explosion within 31 miliseconds.
Insects are indeed pretty damn amazing animals, and a great model for robotics. The authors have continued their work on the hexapod gait, and have proposed several models of ways in which legs might be built–in both roaches and robots–to respond quickly to problems.
Science is awesome.
Citation: Jindrich DL, & Full RJ (2002). Dynamic stabilization of rapid hexapedal locomotion. The Journal of experimental biology, 205 (Pt 18), 2803-23 PMID: 12177146
Revzen S, Koditschek DE, & Full RJ (2009). Towards testable neuromechanical control architectures for running. Advances in experimental medicine and biology, 629, 25-55 PMID: 19227494
Also: Just look at how easily the Star Wars AT-AT or AT-STs were destroyed by the rebels! Tripod-gait woud have saved the empire!
I did another podcast–this time I was a guest on Wild Ideas, a podcast from a Nature Center in Ohio. You can listen here.
Before the bug stuff, there is a short discussion of radio isotopes and fracking, which I bet you’ve never heard with a background of owls calling!
They start talking about insects at 19:00, and I arrive to talk about bogus insect control devices at 26:25. We also discussed insect repellents, spandex, and if mosquitoes bite zombies.
You may have heard that I told a slightly rude story at the 
I did another podcast–this time I was a guest on 
