“Charles Darwin considered costly traits that could not be accounted for by survival advantage, such as peacock tails, problematic to his theory of evolution by natural selection. He later realized that these features conferred reproductive advantage in the acquisition of mating partners.” Could this peacock tail insight be applied to humans? Specifically male humans? More […]
Tag: wheel
Molecular wheelbarrows under the (scanning tunneling) microscope
The idea of a molecular wheelbarrow was first raised [Improbable believes] in 2002 by C Joachim, H Tang, F Moresco, G Rapenne and G Meyer in the journal Nanotechnology, Volume 13, Number 3: ‘The design of a nanoscale molecular barrow’. Later, as described in Surface Science Letters, 584, 2005, L153 – L158, a research team […]
They have revoked the patent for the wheel
I have begun blogging about Improbable Innovation (a very broad category, that!) for the Boston Globe‘s BetaBoston.com web site. My first report there begins: Re-inventing the wheel: Why not? Many do. Despite the warning “Don’t re-invent the wheel”, people continue to reinvent the wheel. Some of those people file patent applications. Patent offices even approve […]
Wild Mice Utilize a Wheel of Fortuitous Apparation
Wheels sometimes do crop up in nature, especially when a human placed them there. Humans recently did it again, as this report makes clear: “Wheel Running in the Wild,” Johanna H. (“Joke”) Meijer [pictured here] and Yuri Robbers, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 281 no. 1786, July 7, 2014. The authors, at Leiden University […]
Octopus goes twice as fast, with a wheel
How fast does an octopus typically run in an exercise wheel? That has yet to be determined. But one value is reported in the study: “Cutaneous Respiration in Octopus Vulgaris,” J.J. Madan and M.J. Wells, Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 199, pp. 2477–2483 (1996). The authors, at the University of Cambridge, UK, explain, citing two […]
The beetle that, also, invented the wheel
When the Australian patent office granted a patent in the year 2001 to Mr. John Keogh for inventing the wheel (an action for which they shared an Ig Nobel Prize), little acknowledgment was given to the several animals who regularly reinvent themselves a wheels. One of those animals is celebrated in a new study: “Wind-Powered […]