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from the keep-going-and-going-and-going dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Anyone who's tried to kill a cockroach knows that the ancient pests have some world-class evasive maneuvers. Or at least they appear to.
The agility of cockroaches may owe less to lightning-fast reflexes and fancy footwork than their tough, shock-absorbent bodies. According to a new study, American cockroaches can run full-speed into walls and other obstacles because their exoskeletons allow them to recover quickly with hardly any loss in momentum.
"Their bodies are doing the computing, not their brains or complex sensors," said Kaushik Jayaram, a biologist at Harvard University and lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
The findings -which were further validated by a tiny, cockroach-sized robot - could influence the design of the next generation of robots that run, jump and fly.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:37PM
I don't think this approach would work for anything very large...unless it was also *extremely* light. it's true that momentum is only linear with mass, but it's also linear with velocity, and since larger things need to move faster, there's essentially a square factor in the scaling. If you moved at the speed of a fast cockroach, you'd be moving pretty slowly. (Admittedly, it's difficult to time how long it would take a cockroach to run a mile.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.