YES! It's the twists-in-midair FALLING GECKO ROBOT!
Grumbling taxpayers concerned that much so-called academic "research" actually consists of boffins basically mucking about at public expense can calm down. Today brings news of university researchers maintaining a laser-like focus and toiling hard on projects which deliver immediate and obvious betterment to a suffering humanity …
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No offensive to our iron gecko overloads
But that footage of the ferrous lizard is about as good as the film you see of Nessie.
After all that time and sitting through 3 loads of lizard falling off the ceiling, they couldn't set a decent camera angle?
Murphy's law
I'll bet if you spread jam on it, it will still land sticky-side down on the carpet.
Never mind Murphy
Which way up will it land if Veronica bitch-slaps it one with a power-fist?
Not sure about the bootnote.
Surely if their sticky feet were that bloody marvellous, they wouldn't have needed to develop a method of landing the right way up when they fell off the ceiling?
Not so smug now are we mister lizard?
A down vote for TeeCee
Why...please why?
ahh it was the "Mr lizard" fanclub
Mr Lizard club, "one downvote"
There's more of us. Where were you in the 80s? Haven't you seen V?
or.....
just make the belly side heavier than the top side....
There, now raise the Uni fees to stop the free loaders...
Next out of the bag: CatBot
Geckos are all well and good, but since they're in the market of getting funds for dropping inverted animals and filming the look on their faces as they fall, can't we get conclusive evidence from the Gaffer taping two cats back to back gravity paradox experiment. Whilst we're at it let's have a try at the epoxying buttered toast to a cat's back experiment.
Step aside LHC lamers!
We're exploring the anti-gravity properties of toast buttered on both sides.
Higgs-Boson... Pah!
Alternatively
Is it possible to create butter from nothing by dropping unbuttered toast? Does it hover forever, or simply create butter on one side so it can land?
Been done
Someone has already done a load of "research" on the landing habbits of buttered toast. I think that it might have even been covered by the ignoble awards (or the reg!). The research was flawed* though, and the results were wrong.
*Perhaps they used "it tastes like butter" (but doesn't fall like butter).
OK now I'm starting to believe what the misses says about remembering everything I read!
Re: Alternatively
Hmm...I was wondering where the anti-butter came into play. That sounds like a better reason for the butter side to land down.
@BristolBachelor
I also read something like that where someone had done a load of research... Roughly speaking it has more to do with the height the toast is dropped from (about 5 ft for most people) than whether it is buttered or not.
The squamato-mimetic bot-flip project
You had fun with that article, didn't you Lewis?!
Close but no banana
He got me at "squamato-tumblewrithe tech".
~R
Makes me wonder ..
Seeing the metal mesh the gecko was clinging to make me wonder is a little electrical ZAP was induced to 'encourage' the lil bugger to take the leap ..
It's not that I *want* to pop the balloon
This robot's trick is nothing more than an application of conservation of angular momentum, and as such needed no investigation of geckos. The physics is a few hundred years old, the equations of motion derived from a Hamiltonian. Now, kids, go to Wikipedia and find out when Hamilton's formulation was cooked up.
I can only imagine the boffins brought in the gecko and the gecko-cutout piece of plastic to make their work more cutesy for the unwashed masses and the funding agencies.
This thing *really is* wanking!
Basic principles != specific implementation
This is more about stealing an existing, working design for building new kinds of robot rather than trying to design something new from scratch without the benefits of a few million years of testing.
Complaining that because we understand the underlying mathematics behind something we have no need to ever study the phenomenon ever again is obtuse at best.
@Ru
Oh, BS. This not so complicated that it needed an example to implement.
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