Posted on 10/14/2005 11:12:18 AM PDT by TChris
Fleas use it to perform leaps that would make Olympic high jumpers green with envy. Bees use it to flap their wings without tiring.
Now Australian scientists have achieved a world first by copying resilin, the "rubber" insects employ to accomplish such athletic feats.
Future versions of the material could be used to make resilient spare parts, including spinal discs and artificial arteries.
Chris Elvin, from CSIRO Livestock Industries in Brisbane, spent four years reproducing nature's "near perfect rubber". Dr Elvin said yesterday: "Nature had a couple of hundred million years of evolution do it. All insects have it. It gives them almost frictionless movement.
"Fleas have a pad of it in their legs. They squeeze and compress it, storing energy in it." When they want to jump "they release all that energy in a millisecond".
If humans had such pads they could leap 100-storey buildings.
Dragonflies and bees use resilin to beat their wings all day long.
"Bees can flap their wings 720,000 times an hour," he said. "In their lifetimes they must flap their wings 500 million times." The scientists initially cloned the fruit fly gene that naturally produces the material. It was then put into bacteria, creating a biological "factory" to reproduce it as a liquid. The liquid was then cured under projector bulbs to form a workable solid. "We currently make sufficient material for research purposes, but this could be scaled up for commercial use," Dr Elvin said. "It looks a bit spaghetti [but] we can cast it in any shape."
Dr Elvin predicted the substance would lead to everything from artificial arteries to spinal parts that would not wear out despite being flexed 100 million times.
"That's how many times you move your back in 50 or 60 years," he said. It could also be used in micro electronics. "We even imagine putting it in running shoes."
However, Dr Elvin, whose work has been published in Nature, said making artificial human parts was at least a decade away.
The team he stitched together to study resilin includes three other CSIRO divisions - Textiles and Fibre Technology, Molecular and Health Technologies and Manufacturing and Infrastructure Technologies, along with Queensland University, the Australian National University, Monash University and the University of South Australia. They are seeking commercial partners to develop the material. "Some of the markets we are looking at are worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year."
Please correct word in title (Elatic --> Elastic)
Flubber!
Amazing stuff. And, apparently, it came about through random changes in DNA. And was perfected in a particular creature. Who then became the ancestor of all insects. Which is why all insects have this substance.
Ya gotta believe.
All praise and glory to the holy trinity creator-god of chaos, chance and time.
ping
Friday bump: Men sorta do the same thing, just not with their legs...
There would be a lot of broken ankles and necks. Might even be that humans would go extinct in the first generation that has this modification. No child would live past nine--dare; double-dare.
BOING!
No they couldn't.
Nor could a human-size flea. Muscle strength scales as the square of the body size; but body weight scales as the cube of the body size. So increase the length of a flea 100 times, and its weight would increase a million times, while its strength would increase just 10,000 times.
In physics class in high school we looked at whether the big dinsaurs could even stand up on their stumpy legs.
What did you conclude?
We decided that for those bigger than elephants or mammoths, they crawled along like alligators out of the water. Tyrannosaurus was all legs and could get by, feathers or not. If we had these springy things in our knees we could probably bound along well enough, but jumping up more than one storey might be out of the question.
"It looks a bit spaghetti [but] we can cast it in any shape."LOL, isn't it amazing how these godless scientist keep validating Flying Spaghetti Monsterism even though they are unbelievers! Surely this is the substance of which His Noodly Appendage is made. How else could He whip the planets around without HNA breaking from the strain?
rAmen!
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