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Just how tiny can something be made...and still have it work?
https://www.earth.com/news/unexpected-find-inside-the-eye-of-a-tiny-wasp-megaphragma-viggianii/
Megaphragma wasps do more than just outsmart thrips. They also show how far miniaturization can go before basic features stop working.
Most insects rely on their eyes for movement and exploration. Ommatidia form the building blocks of these compound eyes and act like small detectors for incoming light.
In Megaphragma viggianii, researchers have counted a total of 29 ommatidia, which is extremely low compared to the number in the eyes of bigger insects.
Each tiny ommatidium uses a lens that measures around 8 micrometers, but that's still enough to focus light onto specialized structures below.
The rhabdom within each ommatidium (the optical units that make up the insect's compound eye) has stayed thick enough – about 2 micrometers – to catch adequate light and send signals to the brain.
This balance between lens size and rhabdom thickness seems to preserve clear vision during daylight hours.
Packed pigment granules line the sides of each ommatidium. They block stray light that might otherwise blur the wasp's vision.
Maintaining sight at such a small scale may demand a lot of energy. Some data hint at heavy loads of mitochondria in these photoreceptor cells, suggesting that vision comes with a metabolic price.
Roughly a third of the ommatidia cluster near the dorsal region of the eye. These specialized structures appear to detect polarized light, a feature known to help insects orientate under open skies.
In many insects, the dorsal rim area is essential for successful navigation and migration. It provides steady guidance, even when visual landmarks are absent.
In addition, a few unique photoreceptor cells hide behind the first row of ommatidia. They are positioned to receive light indirectly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10, @04:46PM (9 children)
They're no geniuses but how are they that "smart" with such small low wattage brains.
That said some single celled creatures can evade, hunt, build shells, etc with no neurons at all...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday March 10, @05:12PM (3 children)
We can build machines with tiny microprocessors that also do amazing things. Like vacuum the floor and learn the layout of the house. Or interrupt you to say that some item is on sale on Amazon.
A biological organism with a tiny brain, or even no brain, has only one real job: to reproduce.
All other activities are secondary and in service to that primary job.
The amount of rust code in Linux has grown.
The amount of rust code in Linux has groan.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10, @07:17PM
So.. just like us. Reproduction is our sole function. Money is nothing more than an aphrodisiac
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday March 10, @08:25PM (1 child)
"to reproduce"...
That's a tall order!
That's on top of everything else - like maintaining life functions.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 11, @02:12PM
Maintaining life functions is for the purpose of reproduction. If you can't maintain life functions, you don't reproduce. Whatever traits prevented you from maintaining life functions don't get propagated into the next generation.
The amount of rust code in Linux has grown.
The amount of rust code in Linux has groan.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday March 10, @05:52PM
Effective autonomous weapons could be built at the same level of processing complexity.
Yes, single cells are already used as bioweapons for centuries, but the future of warfare is artificial insects.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by Samantha Wright on Monday March 10, @07:17PM
Much of the accomplishments of evolution aren't so much capability but efficiency. (Big, fancy vertebrate brains are a notable exception.) The Bacteria/Archaean split has an eerie similarity to deploying Redis cache servers...
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday March 10, @09:30PM (2 children)
"They do all that evasion, searching for food and parasiting with just 4600 neuron brains."
The 8080 had 4500 transistors...
https://techwithtech.com/zilog-z80-vs-mos-6502-vs-intel-8080-best/ [techwithtech.com]
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @10:06AM (1 child)
A neuron does a lot more than a transistor. It's more like 4,600 processors, each with a small amount of ram, with a lot of programming built into the wiring too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @11:14AM
True...I noted an eerie similarity in count.
I've seen some analog circuits for one neuron. It was quite sophisticated. Lots of inputs, some causatory, some inhibitory, and lots of trimpots ( chemical hormone settings ). I don't think an 8080 could actually keep up with it realtime, because of all the different gain and timer processing.
I guess I see a neuron as an analog part that uses frequencies as data.