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No Air Currents Required: Ballooning Spiders Rely on Electric Fields to Generate Lift

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 07 2022, @08:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the flying-spiders-FTW-of-nightmares dept.
Science

upstart writes:

No air currents required: Ballooning spiders rely on electric fields to generate lift:

In 1832, Charles Darwin witnessed hundreds of ballooning spiders landing on the HMS Beagle while some 60 miles offshore. Ballooning is a phenomenon that's been known since at least the days of Aristotle—and immortalized in E.B. White's children's classic Charlotte's Web—but scientists have only recently made progress in gaining a better understanding of its underlying physics.

Now, physicists have developed a new mathematical model incorporating all the various forces at play as well as the effects of multiple threads, according to a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review E. Authors M. Khalid Jawed (UCLA) and Charbel Habchi (Notre Dame University-Louaize) based their new model on a computer graphics algorithm used to model fur and hair in such blockbuster films as The Hobbit and Planet of the Apes. The work could one day contribute to the design of new types of ballooning sensors for explorations of the atmosphere.

Journal Reference:
Charbel Habchi, Mohammad K. Jawed. Ballooning in spiders using multiple silk threads, Physical Review E (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.105.034401)

Original Submission

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2022, @02:25PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2022, @02:25PM (#1235456)

    If this is possible to scale to human size, can we start to levitate using the same principles?
    Not sure if having some big strings waving around is going to be easy to manage.
    How about an emitter that does something similar to what we see on CGI effects in The Matrix ships electro-statically zipping around?
    It's just a matter of time, we all want our flying cars.
    Getting rid of highways would be a big win for the environment too.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday April 07 2022, @02:42PM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 07 2022, @02:42PM (#1235460) Journal
      Consider that scale. We go from tens of milligrams to the order of 100 kg. That's seven orders of magnitude. Your electric field needs to scale by that amount too. Perhaps the balloon as well. I don't think it's feasible on a mass scale.

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by inertnet on Thursday April 07 2022, @02:50PM (1 child)

        by inertnet (4071) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 07 2022, @02:50PM (#1235464) Journal

        Also, surface area scales up quadratic while volume (and thus mass) scales up cubed. That's why raindrops fall and mist drops float, or better, fall at a rate of centimetres per hour.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @04:07AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @04:07AM (#1235604)

          My guess is that this is how just one dandelion manages to seed it's progeny across the whole neighborhood.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2022, @05:35PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2022, @05:35PM (#1235504)

      I mean:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2022, @06:21PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2022, @06:21PM (#1235515)

        I've sold maglevs to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, by gum.

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