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 …
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!
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!
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!
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.
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