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First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
- mrb 13y agoWhy do they say the gears "look nothing like what you'd find in your car"? They look very similar to me.
- ocharles 13y agoTo me it appears that there are teeth on one "side" of the gear, but on the back of it is a flat surface. The valley between the teeth is sloped from front to back, going from a deep valley to no valley at all. At least, that was what I took from that picture.
- Kliment 13y agoJust like herringbone gers you find in old sewing machines, designed to self-align in one direction.
- mzs 13y agoIn fact they look much like spider gears.
- teddyh 13y agoThis gives us four possibilities: 1. This geared creature must be considered part mechanical. A cyborg, if you will. 2. A "gear" is no longer (and was never) a "mechanical" device, but instead an organic one. Using gears is no longer (and was maybe never) doing mechanics. 3. Whether something is mechanical or organic depends on the process which created it. This is the "colored bits" or "patent" view. (If I build something using intuition instead of reason, am I no longer doing mechanics?) 4. A gear is no longer (and was never) either mechanic or organic, and is simply a physical process. The whole "mechanical" and "organic" division is a false dichotomy.
- andrew_gardener 13y agoI think option 4 is most accurate. Bones and joints basically act as levers and pivots so why can't gear like body parts be found in other lifeforms.
- igravious 13y ago5. All dichotomies are false dichotomies. 6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution.
- brianpgordon 13y agoCreatures with cool adaptations strengthen my faith in evolution. It's creatures like the panda or the koala or the sloth that shake my faith in evolution.
- EvanKelly 13y agoThe sloth's evolutionary advantage is that they are so fucking cool.
- maxerickson 13y agoDid you do that on purpose?
- EvanKelly 13y agoNot sure what you mean, so I guess not.
- maxerickson 13y agoThey have a slow metabolism, this requires less energy for survival but also generates less heat.
- crusso 13y ago6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution. Why? It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics. Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. There was pressure on those mutations to proceed toward gears since the gear mechanism is a potentially successful one for achieving the goal of survival through jumping very far, very quickly. Evolution has yielded some astoundingly more impressive structures. Take a look at this video that explains your own muscle contractions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ309LfHQ3M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ309LfHQ3M The fact that our brains can pattern match the semblance of gears in the issid with gears that we created is a much more impressive development than the gears of the issid themselves.
- rocky1138 13y agoHmm.. the text wouldn't load for me. Anyone have a copy of the article?
- piyush_soni 13y agoHumm ... Try another browser?
- natively 13y agoHere you go: https://gist.github.com/natively/6542819 https://gist.github.com/natively/6542819
- rocky1138 13y agoThanks!
- lifeformed 13y agoIt's Ghostery, it killed it somehow. Not sure if it's the site's fault or Ghostery's?
- djim 13y agoI just incognito when Ghostery messes up the page view.
- rocky1138 13y agoI tried the viewtext.org Chrome extension, but it hasn't worked in a while :( I really loved that one.
- benologist 13y agoGhostery adds some weird play button you have to click to view the article, not sure what that is but it's new and annoying.
- theon144 13y ago
- alan_cx 13y agoI wonder how its prevents wear? Could be something quite revolutionary there for the finding. Some sort of new organic lubricant, or something in the gears that self lubricates.
- john_b 13y agoMaybe it doesn't. The last paragraph of the article implies that wear eventually would compromise the gears, but that the insect molting and replacing the old gears with new ones (frequently?) prevents it from being a problem.
- npsimons 13y agoWhich leads to the classic answer to the age old question of how you make a car last forever: buy three, one to keep, and the other two for parts.
- jacquesm 13y agoThat's for very small values of 'forever', after 3x the average lifespan of some critical component you are again without transportation.
- X4 13y agomaybe self-healing? I am curious to know more
- rdtsc 13y agoThe creature sheds it exoskeleton at it grows. Adults don't have this gear "feature" apparently.
- andrew_gardener 13y agoWhile I can't be certain, I believe it might not handle wear very well based on the article. Near the end they mention that it molts several times growing new, larger versions of the gears. When its an adult, it actually loses these gears entirely. Their theory is that when the insect is fully grown is gets rid of the gears since it can no longer molt and thus replace them if they become damaged.
- ruethewhirled 13y agoI found it amusing that to view the 1 second video at the end I had to watch a 30 second advert first
- ffrryuu 13y agoDoes that mean the patent for the gear is now invalid?
- nilved 13y agoNo, the issus is obligated to pay royalties.
- dekhn 13y agoI'm pretty sure that the bacterial flagellum is effectively a mechanical gear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_s...
- ehsanu1 13y agoMore of a motor than a gear.
- pygy_ 13y agoNo, it converts the proton concentration gradient into mechanical energy. The ATP synthase also works that way. The ADP and Pi are mechanically squeezed against each other in order to create the covalent bound. See the last two videos of [0] for the general process. The first three focus on details. [0] http://www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk/category/slideshows/atpmovies http://www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk/category/slideshows/atpmovies
- dekhn 13y ago"ADP and Pi are mechanically squeezed against each other in order to create the covalent bond." I have a PhD in Biophysics. If I ever said "ADP and Pi were squeezed together", I'd have been laughed out of journal club. The fine details of the reaction coordinate are still being argued about. I'll grant you there are no canonical gears as a mechanical engineer would recognize them. I wasn't talking about the motive coupling. But a number of the physical structures (proteins) that couple the anchoring to the moving body have gear like properties. These are used to orient and clock the moving body in its cycle. OK, I'll up it a notch since you guys are being picky. There are motor proteins which use ATP hydrolysis to do directed (non-random) motion. One of the plausible (IIRC it's passe now) mechanisms involved coupling the ATP hydrolysis free energy to a physical ratchet-like mechanism which, while didn't physically look like a gear when you looked at static crystal structures, seemed to behave like one using various subtle time-resolved mechanisms.
- pygy_ 13y agoDoctor of medicine here, with basic notions of chemistry and biochemistry from courses I took 16 years ago. I sure know what I'm talking about! ;-) More seriously, I had inferred the squeezing from the videos I linked to. If I understand properly, the mechanical constrains on the ADP, Pi and AA residuals involved result in the formation of the high energy covalent bound between the two phosphates. Thus mechanical -> chemical energy. I thought that the pressure between the electron clouds of the two molecules caused some superficial electrons to hop, resulting in the new covalent bound (that's what I meant by squeezing), and the dehydration. Is this mostly correct (with possible intermediate steps where either the Pi or the ADP end up in a temporary covalent bound of even higher energy with subunits of the ÀTP synthase), or is this pure hogwash? Also, thanks for the explanations regarding the flagellum, that's very interesting :-) > I'll grant you there are no canonical gears as a mechanical engineer would recognize them. I wasn't talking about the motive coupling. But a number of the physical structures (proteins) that couple the anchoring to the moving body have gear like properties. These are used to orient and clock the moving body in its cycle. Is it mediated by alternating, matching stripes of charged or polar AA residuals?
- kriro 13y agoMaybe a little cruel but I'd be interested in some sort of study where a large number of issus' are placed in an environment with a couple of predators. Repeat this with young and adult versions and see if/how much the gear system (adults don't have it) improves the odds of surviving attacks.
- gizmo686 13y agoWhat you would be testing is how much of an advantage the young have over the adults. I find it extremely unlikely that the gears are the only difference.
- kriro 13y agoYes and the gears would be hard to isolate as the lone cause (adults have more experience fighting prey etc.) so maybe you'd have to genetically engineer two groups one with gears and one without. Either way the hypothesis they gave as to why the gears are eventually mutated away makes sense but has me wondering why they don't keep replacing them instead of settling on living without them. Thus I'd like to quantify the edge said gears provide as a starting point for the investigation :)
- jere 13y ago>Even stranger is that the issus doesn't keep these gears throughout its life cycle. As the adolescent insect grows, it molts half a dozen times, upgrading its exoskeleton (gears included) for larger and larger versions. Gotta catch em all.
- charlieflowers 13y agoIt's kind of like getting your timing belt replaced.
- jberryman 13y agoCan someone explain what this means? I don't get it: > Most other bugs synchronize the quick jolt of their leaping legs through friction, using bumpy or grippy surfaces to press the top of their legs together
- BrandonY 13y agoI don't know much about biology, but I imagine that if your legs were very lightweight and bumpy, and you pressed them firmly against each other, they would probably stick together pretty well, and so if you tried to move them both in the same direction, but with differing amounts of force, they'd probably stay together and therefore press down in sync.
- smoyer 13y agoThey "almost" have Velcro between their thighs.
- jasonkolb 13y agoSo assuming we can one day mimick this feat of engineering, can I look forward to my car literally dying on me in traffic?
- ihsw 13y agoThis article was posted to reddit, and incidentally the author is a redditor. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1m9eke/scientists_discover_the_first_mechanical_gear_in/?sort=top http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1m9eke/scientists_d... They're taking questions.
- mkmk 13y agoJust to clarify, it looks like the journalist is taking questions, not the author of the paper.
- fosap 13y agoI can swear I saw pictures of this years ago. I a series of lectures by different speakers. This can't be a new finding.
- yohann305 13y agoIn other words, we, human beings, are just reinventing natural occurring (or may have been extinct) mechanics and are putting patents on it. Okay if you own a patent and sued someone for it, it's time to hand back the money!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- swamp40 13y agoI agree with you 100%. Don't know why you got downvoted.
- cristianpascu 13y agoI should better leave aside my hopes for a conversation.
- electronous 13y agoGod is real.
- drdaeman 13y agoUnless declared integer.
- swamp40 13y agoIt is for beauty like this that I believe all living things were originally designed by some intelligence, somewhere. Perhaps designed to mutate and evolve, or perhaps that was a limitation in the source materials, but there are some beautifully engineered living systems on our planet.
- chockablock 13y agonon sequitur. Why does beauty imply the existence of an intelligent designer?
- swamp40 13y agoEngineering beauty. Like a Saturn V rocket, or an AC induction motor. Things that make you proud to be an engineer.
- biomecha 13y agoSo that intelligence would be able to feel proud of something? That's a very human concept.
- swamp40 13y agoWell, I was just explaining why I used the word beauty. Maybe whatever created these gears was being tortured by an evil master until it made something satisfactory. I really can't say for sure...
- iron_ball 13y agoGod cannot feel pride, for that would imply the possibility of failure. God is beyond most human emotions, probably all, for that reason: our emotions imply their opposites, while for God, there are no alternatives other than what is -- which is by definition perfect. Mind you, I'm an atheist, so this is just my understanding of the argument.
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- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- m-photonic 13y ago"They're rather specialized, and there are lots of other jumpers that don't have them, so there must be some kind of advantage." Not necessarily. Evolution has a lot to do with path dependence and in no way guarantees the best of all possible adaptations.
- zdean 13y agoCould you clarify/expound on this?
- robbiep 13y agoPerhaps the best option would be if you went out and grabbed a copy of 'Climbing mount improbable' - It will answer all your questions on this and then some
- jerf 13y agoEvolution works by incremental changes, each of which to a first approximation must be at least neutral and preferably advantageous to producing offspring. In order for evolution to get from A to B, there must be a path of incremental advantageous changes to get from here to there. It can't magically leap from one optimum to another. So you see things like the way the same basic body plan is reused endlessly in the natural world; with only incremental changes available to create the next species, you can't create a whole new body plan from scratch, even if it would be completely appropriate due to, say, transitioning from land to water. It is also completely goalless; if there is a fantastic two-gene change that a species could make, even if both are individually advantageous, there's no particular force that will cause them to occur [1]. Evolution is both very powerful, with many people underestimating it, and profoundly stupid, with many people also overestimating it. Once humans really get cracking with the gene engineering (which has proved harder than we had initially hoped, but I'm still confident we'll get there), I'm sure we'll find a plethora of relatively simple changes we can make to natural organisms that may involve changing three or four genes simultaneously where no single change is advantageous, which is a thing that evolution essentially can't do. [1]: Or at least, not yet... one bizarre-ish, "Selfish Gene" way of looking at human gene engineering is evolution evolving itself a way to make those multi-gene changes. Still not in a directed fashion, of course. But evolution will still apply to our own gene engineered creations, just possibly with a very different set of constraints, such as potentially severing the billion-year-old connection between fitness and direct biological reproduction... as I've said on HN before, you don't have to be a full-on "Rapture of the Nerds"-style Singulatarian to see that the future may get very weird....
- drakaal 13y agoThe Transformers evolved from naturally occurring gears. It says so in Issue 1 of the comic series.
- ThomPete 13y agoI would like to see the patent trolls trumf that.
- stcredzero 13y ago> In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g's—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand. This is entirely incorrect. 9g is the limit that someone can stay conscious, but the body can withstand a lot more. Experimental subject John Stapp withstood 46.2 g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G-force#Horizontal_axis_g-force http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G-force#Horizontal...
- ByronT 13y agoI think it depends on the direction of the acceleration. The John Stapp experiment was horizontal acceleration, right? Right above that: "... if g-forces are not quickly reduced, death can occur. Resistance to "negative" or "downward" g, which drives blood to the head, is much lower. This limit is typically in the −2 to −3 g (about −20 m/s² to −30 m/s²) range."
- milkshakes 13y agorelevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster
- guard-of-terra 13y agoSurprisingly it doesn't use reverse g "upwards" but rather an ordinary 10g "downwards". I wonder why is that and can't they make the system much smaller by aiming for the head.
- damoncali 13y agoI used to work at NASA on space shuttle launches. My boss at the time had an old (50's? 60's?) era book that detailed the testing on what acceleration would do to a monkey. I felt bad for the monkey. But yes, direction matters.
- JackFr 13y agoNot to mention that the survivable g's are not scale invariant. At the size of an insect it would be easy to survive 400 g's, but at I mile tall, one g would probably kill us.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoOMG - that electron microscope picture, as long as it is genuine, just blows you away. it's a picture of a gear - cogs and teeth and - wow ...
- educating 13y agoThis is misleading. It looks like a gear, but they are just evolved nodules that caused friction that helped the bug escape predators better. We call it a gear but it is just a mix of physics, life, and death.
- noselasd 13y agoIf this isn't a gear, then what is a gear ?
- naughtysriram 13y agoThat should be called as a biological gear, like we don't say first mechanical camera found on human head.
- mschmo 13y agoSome proteins like ATP synthase kind of act like gears as well: http://www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/images/image/atpsynanim.gif http://www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/images/imag...