Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity (vice.com) 164
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Halloween in 1832, the naturalist Charles Darwin was onboard the HMS Beagle. He marveled at spiders that had landed on the ship after floating across huge ocean distances. "I caught some of the Aeronaut spiders which must have come at least 60 miles," he noted in his diary. "How inexplicable is the cause which induces these small insects, as it now appears in both hemispheres, to undertake their aerial excursions." Small spiders achieve flight by aiming their butts at the sky and releasing tendrils of silk to generate lift.
Darwin thought that electricity might be involved when he noticed that spider silk stands seemed to repel each other with electrostatic force, but many scientists assumed that the arachnids, known as "ballooning" spiders, were simply sailing on the wind like a paraglider. The wind power explanation has thus far been unable to account for observations of spiders rapidly launching into the air, even when winds are low, however. Now, these aerial excursions have been empirically determined to be largely powered by electricity, according to new research published Thursday in Current Biology. Led by Erica Morley, a sensory biophysicist at the University of Bristol, the study settles a longstanding debate about whether wind energy or electrostatic forces are responsible for spider ballooning locomotion.
Darwin thought that electricity might be involved when he noticed that spider silk stands seemed to repel each other with electrostatic force, but many scientists assumed that the arachnids, known as "ballooning" spiders, were simply sailing on the wind like a paraglider. The wind power explanation has thus far been unable to account for observations of spiders rapidly launching into the air, even when winds are low, however. Now, these aerial excursions have been empirically determined to be largely powered by electricity, according to new research published Thursday in Current Biology. Led by Erica Morley, a sensory biophysicist at the University of Bristol, the study settles a longstanding debate about whether wind energy or electrostatic forces are responsible for spider ballooning locomotion.
Anti-darwinism (Score:2, Funny)
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But electricity is needed to keep Earth's flat disk together.
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It's like gravity, just a theory with no proof. :-)
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It's like gravity, just a theory with no proof.
Proof? There's obvious proof that gravity is a hoax. When I drop a pencil, I can observe the ground rushing up toward it at 9.8 m/s/s. This is proof that disc-Earth is under constant linear acceleration. You might think we'd reach c after about a year, but for an explanation of why that doesn't occur I refer you to Einstein's papers on the subject. Of course, you have to read them in the original Hebrew before they were censored by NASA.
Besides, if gravity is real, and our planet is a sphere, then which way
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Up and down are always perpendicular to widdershins.
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Re:Anti-darwinism (Score:5, Funny)
Well... Can you see electricity? Nope.
(A blinding, blue-white bolt of lightning strikes AC)
Thor has spoken.
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Technically, that's just really hot arc plasma. The electricity itself is not visible.
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As I said, the first-order effects of electricity are readily observable. Sure, the underlying theory behind it may not be, but that's hardly relevant. I don't care if god is pushing little electroangels through the air. So technically, it just doesn't fucking matter if I can see it while gauging its existence.
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So... your view is paying lip service to the idea you could be wrong but entangling your perspective with an idea that doesn't allow you get results from a conflicting model the longer your current model goes without recognizing the more entangled you get and more trapped in the ideas of t
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Second, how could a lack of care about the underlying theoretical pinnings of a physical phenomenon with easily visible effects that can be modeled easily enough with just that, in response to someone making a joking (I hope) retort to being able to deny electricity exists be construed as entanglement of... well, anything?
I think the word emitting part of your brain works a lot faster than the part that
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It's entanglement of thought with previous thoughts. There are multiple paths to patterns that are very similar in a loose logical way, those are looser patterns that contain a greater possibility space by virtue of being less defined, but the more you define them, the smaller the possibility space becomes. Because we are passing these ideas across generations, and both reusing the words and have brains filled and encumbered by previous ideas and thoughts it actuall
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Well... Can you see electricity? Nope.
(A blinding, blue-white bolt of lightning strikes AC)
Thor has spoken.
Thank you sir - made my day!
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Can you see electricity?
I can see ionized air that it is passing through well enough.
Can you produce it?
Yes?
You just take it on faith that electricity exists don't you?
No.. I may have to take the underlying QED in faith because that's a little harder to observe at my level, but electricity? Definitely not.
Have you ever actually been to a coal plant?
No
Are you there when the electrons pass through wires?
No
You aren't there. YOU take it on FAITH.
Definitely not. I take it on understanding, having generated electricity with moving magnetic fields and wire, and having powered things from that generated power.
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I can, have, and do produce electricity pretty effortlessly.
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Or hell, maybe he really believes the crap he wrote, we do live in a world of ant-vaxxers , flat earthers and Justin Bieber...
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Spiders are very wise (Score:5, Interesting)
“Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.”
E.B. White, Charlotte's Web
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And since they've been unable to reach said political leaders, they've sunk to harassing lower paid flunkies in public restaurants.
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It was amazing the amount of hatred and number of threats directed at the flunkies working in that restaurant in Ontario.
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And since they've been unable to reach said political leaders, they've sunk to harassing lower paid flunkies in public restaurants.
You say "lower paid flunkies", I say "willing conspirators", and we're both right.
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Well, for that matter, the real danger of Trump is that nobody can afford to make him a lower paid flunky like they did to Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
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Well, for that matter, the real danger of Trump is that nobody can afford to make him a lower paid flunky like they did to Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
Except Putin, you mean?
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No, Putin is Trump's flunky (if he ever wants Trump Tower Moscow built, that is).
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No, Putin is Trump's flunky (if he ever wants Trump Tower Moscow built, that is).
Putin couldn't care less who builds stuff in Russia. But Trump is desperate to put his name on more stuff, and always has been.
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If Putin wants to be able to export natural gas, he has to go through Trump to get to Germany now.
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Some rich men need no more. Trump is quite clearly not one of those kind. There's no reason to think he can't be bought for the price of a niece piece of beach property in Gelendzhik. Beyond that, there's no reason to think he wouldn't sell the inferior of his two daughters for a cheeseburger.
Some poor men need no more.
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I think Trump is telling the truth when he claimed during the primary that he needs neither money nor possessions. His name alone, when licensed properly, is enough for him. I'm surprised you don't understand that. Just look at the contracts he has negotiated over the past 40 years: All the risk has always been on other people.
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His name alone, when licensed properly, is enough for him
Enough for him to make money- yes. Enough for him ?
I'm surprised you don't see right through that, when all available evidence is to the contrary. The man is still monetizing his presidency. He clearly doesn't have enough.
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Enough for him to make money *AT ANYTHING*. Why is it you think he doesn't pay subcontractors? And yes, of course he is monetizing his presidency- and that's why he owns puny politicians like Putin and McConnell, because all they can see is the money POWER brings, which is nothing in comparison to the Trump name.
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That man needs more than money. In fact, he has more of that than he needs. There are other currencies when buying politicians. In fact, they're preferred since literal bribes are illegal.
Trump would sell out an entire class of people to get a golf course somewhere he wanted one, but could not put it.
and that's why he owns puny politicians like Putin and McConnell
OK, you're just a fucking idiot.
Putin would have that man straight up killed if the cost ever dropped below the return. Beyond that, Putin is one of the ric
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What makes you think Trump wouldn't do the same to Putin, if the profit were enough?
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Bill hit 50% or greater in virtually every election he was in. The only times he didn't, there were strong third party offers that soaked up votes. He did loose two elections, but then out of over 20 years of politicking, i'd have to say that's pretty good.
As for Hillary, you may not like her because you've been conditioned to by the fascists at Fox News, but here's two things to remember.... Even if that was the only reason she was in politics, she still had a far be
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Bill Clinton did not win a majority of the votes.
How legitimate is that, really?â(TM)
I would think, given that, that most anyone could understand the context in which it was written.
Obviously (Score:3)
They build a charge by scuffing across the carpet. Humans can't fly because with only 2 feet we can only generate 1/4th the charge.
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They build a charge by scuffing across the carpet. Humans can't fly because with only 2 feet we can only generate 1/4th the charge.
That explains why aircraft cabins are carpeted.
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Exactly. Offering passengers drinks and such is purely a secondary function.
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The subject of this discussion is spiders
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He was referring to Darwin calling them insects.
I'm guessing that would have been valid for the time due to taxonomy being a relatively young and emerging field, so that any creepy crawly thing was considered an insect.
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Or maybe people back then weren't pedantic, attention-seeking, virgin autists who don't understand the basic social nuances of communication.
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Yes, spiders are not insects.
That guy really needs to read a book on zoology.
Antigravity powers? (Score:2)
This proves spiders are alien life forms!
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No, you're thinking of water bears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMaWjP1Ukp4 [youtube.com]
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No "Spidernado"-movie was made, yet? (Score:4, Funny)
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Time for a spin-off.
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I see what you did there.
So (Score:1)
We just need to harvest this silk then we have easy space travel. To think we've been fucking about with rockets until now.
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Imagine the savings on fuel!
I wonder if plants do it too. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if plants do it, too.
A number of plants have windborne seeds surrounded or mounted beneath a thready structure. (Dandelions, cottonwood, and milkweed come to mind immediately.) Other structures could also get some assistance from electriec lift. Charge would be a good thing to look for.
We already know that plants use piezoelectricity to increase cell growth on the concave side of a loaded branch in order to grow upward or outward. Why not another electrical hack?
Why should spiders - or the animal kingdom in general - have all the fun?
scalability (Score:1)
I'm just wondering if this technology can be scaled up to something human-sized. Could this improve the efficiency of personal aircraft designs?
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I'm just wondering if this technology can be scaled up to something human-sized.
It might be interesting to use it, not as primary lift, but as trim lift, on a dirigible.
With essentially neutral bouyancy it doesn't take a lot to make the difference between climbing, hovering, and dropping. Meanwhile, the craft has an enormous area to acquire force from the charge's interaction with the atmosphere's ambient field, while the shape is just about ideal for avoiding corona losses.
You'd want to go zero charge for
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The electric potential becomes dangerous at the power levels you need to lift heavy objects.
Jet engines are dangerous too. Bring on the electrically charged flying machines - at the very least drones...
It would also prevent drones from getting stuck in trees, which would presumably burst into flames if an electrically charged drone hit one.
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We already know that plants use piezoelectricity to increase cell growth on the concave side of a loaded branch in order to grow upward or outward.
HAH! This is really cool. Can you point me to a reference somewhere? I'd love to read about this. Cursory googling is polluted by articles about small scale energy harvesting. Second and third levels of search turn up 20 year old German papers on the material properties of wood without mention of the influence on plant growth.
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Wish I could. I saw that in a civil-service-level electrical engineering trade journal some time in the 1950s or early '60s (that I found in a pile of discarded magazines, when I was a kid with a serious electronics hobby.)
The article was about engineering around possible problems with a high voltage cross-country DC pow
Spidey sense (Score:2)
Thus (Score:5, Insightful)
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A fantastic example of "doesn't scale"? (Score:3)
I think perhaps this is a fantastic example of something that "doesn't scale". If we tried to build a flying machine that used electrostatic forces, we'd just break down the air resistance and create lots of lightning bolts. The spider only needs a little force, because it's tiny. Electrostatic force is enough to fly a spider without throwing sparks.
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Googled. It looks to be electromagnetic, not electrostatic. They're using a conductor passing through a magnetic field as a motor/generator. The spiders are using a statically charged filament.
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The potential difference between the Earth and sky. Since opposites attract, it pulls them up until they reach equilibrium. After that, it's probably a slow parachute-like descent; but perhaps there's also some way for them to accumulate charge at one level of the atmosphere and get pulled to another.
In other words, same thing as lightning but not enough potential difference for a bolt to occur. Instead, the spiders "hair" stands on end and pulls them towards the opposite charge.
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The only problem would be the amount of strands and the strength of the isolation. The main body might need its own fanning-out structure to offer enough surface area for that many strands.
It's cube-square law all over again. If you try to fly something larger by the same principle, it won't work because there's too much mass to area.
WE ARE DOOMED (Score:2)
Doomed, I tell you. DOOMED!
What Electrostatic Forces? (Score:2)
From what I understand, the most significant force is the pull towards magnetic north. Do all these spiders drift north?
And since pure magnets do not even have the force required to do anything noticeable(they are not even particularly light), now in the hell does a spider? How does a spider generate more electromagnetic force per mass than the strongest magnets ever devised? I have never heard of any technology where humans were able to create something that hovered using ambient electrostatic forces.
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How does a spider generate more electromagnetic force per mass than the strongest magnets ever devised?
It doesn't. It doesn't generate any notable EMF.
I have never heard of any technology where humans were able to create something that hovered using ambient electrostatic forces.
What does that have to do with anything?
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How does a spider generate more electromagnetic force per mass than the strongest magnets ever devised?
They don't. They're holding on to a really good static charge accumulator, and then using the Earth's magnetic field to get a little bit of lift out of it. You can do it too, but the electric potentials required to move you noticeably are going to be more than enough to bridge the distance from your tether to the ground (your head)
You likely wouldn't survive the experience.
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But what is the difference between a static charge, and an electromagnet?
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The spider isn't generating the force...
The spider web accumulates a static charge, being a long enough tether, there is a potential difference at the anode, and current will flow, which means the Lorentz force is now giving some force to the spider system. The spider is just along for the ride.
As I said before, the problem with a human is the amount of current/charge required to lift you.
The necessary insulators (air, and the tether) break down at currents required to g
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I don't mean (why don't we use this to allow humans to fly), but why for example junkyard electromagnets do not float when such high current is run through them (ar they at least lighter?). Certainly they must have a higher energy potential per mass than the spider and its silk?
Or do electromagnetic forces work completely differently than electrostatic forces?
Are these spiders even drifting primarily north, or is this not even related to magnetic north in the slightest?
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Are these spiders even drifting primarily north
Good question. I'd bet they do, though.
I suspect local weather patterns have a lot more to do with where they end up, though.
I don't mean (why don't we use this to allow humans to fly), but why for example junkyard electromagnets do not float when such high current is run through them (ar they at least lighter?). Certainly they must have a higher energy potential per mass than the spider and its silk?
OK, I think I see what you're asking.
The problem there is density.
It would take a very long and very powerfully charged electrodynamic tether to lift a human. It would have to push against a lot of the earth's field. Your electromagnet is quite dense, and is pushing on a comparatively small amount of flux from a very weak field.
I imagine it would levitate diamagnetically against t
Spiders are not insects (Score:1)
This Musk guy must be behind this (Score:1)
Does Elon Musk know? (Score:1)
which Darwin is this? (Score:1)
Or was it the Darwin who thought some some human sub species (i.e. "whites") were better than other sub species?
Oh, yeah. Let's pass that guy the microphone
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They're not using batteries. They're just pulling the electricity from the atmosphere directly, like the original Tesla intended. Not like the corporation usurping his name intends to do.
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People that they bite are the batteries.
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no batteries, they get the electricity from the web
What's the URL?
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and look how much better the slashdot comments used to be [slashdot.org]. Used to find gold here. I don't know what this is here now, but it is not gold.
The first post is about politics, though more civil then now, much the same.
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"eat flies and help us"
It should be: they "fly and eat us. Help! There, i fixed that for you. I hope it makes you feel better. Well.. ok, i may have failed at that goal.... LOOK OUT, ABOVE YOU!!!!
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Speaking of fantasy....all the years of investigating Hillary = 0 indictments; one year of investigating Trump's fascists bitches = Over 100 criminal charges, and 5 guilty pleas so far.
http://www.newsweek.com/muelle... [newsweek.com] and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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