Flying has been man’s fantasy for ages, attempts we made as early as late 1800’s. Otto Lilienthal of Germany was the first one with a successful glider flight in the 1890. In the previous articles for this theme session we have read about the dynamic soaring, gliding. Today I would like to discuss some unusual...
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Water and electricity – two things that we normally avoid bringing in contact because it can lead to a bad accident. And there comes the question, how could this combination be an essential survival strategy for many fish species? Electric eels are one of the most known examples and will be presented in this article for...
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Welcome back readers. Hope all of you had a great summer vacation. We start with a new theme ‘Electricity’. We humans are very familiar with the term electricity, because we are surrounded by it. Electricity is powering most of our technology from our cell phones, computers, lights, soldering irons, and so on to basic amenities...
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Many people fear spiders, because they have the reputation of being aggressive animals, only waiting for a chance to kill you. This is of course not true and on the contrary, once you start observing spiders you’ll find they have many fascinating qualities. Especially their highly adaptive silk with one of the toughest fibers not...
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After learning how fish are dealing with high salt concentrations (and especially with changing salt concentrations), I would like to continue with a similar topic this week – but in the plant kingdom. How do plants filter salt out of the water? In particular, I will focus on mangroves – plants which are actually growing...
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What happens to a watermelon, if you throw it the sea? Try to answer this question already now based on your knowledge about physical laws or just make a pure guess. If you are not sure, keep this question in mind while reading the article and you might get a better understanding of the principle...
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As already mentioned in our introduction article about energy storage, the topic of this article will be elastic energy storage. There are many examples of how different animal species use this kind of energy for running, walking or hopping (kangaroos, flees, click beetles, etc.) by using tendons. For them, elastic mechanisms have a great influence...
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I was thrilled to be invited writing about the ice theme, specifically about the polar bears. I have always considered polar bears the epitome of ice warriors (been always fascinated by Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ novels). Millions of years of evolution equipped the polar bear to survive the extremely low winter temperatures in the arctic...
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Hello to this week’s frosty article. My motivation for this article is to show you the paradox which can appear when you try to solve a specific problem via biomimetics or biomimicry. Sometimes you can draw parallels between properties of already found solutions to other circumstances. These parallels first appear to not have any connection...
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The theme of ice gave me a hard time finding a topic to write about. Being the botanist in our group, of course I wanted to write about plants, which made me think about the challenges plants are facing with ice or snow. In areas of constant low temperature, vegetation is generally pretty scarce. Of...
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