Grand Designs
By Rhiannonw
Amazement at the complexity of design in nature, indicating a Designer: designs that help and inspire human designers of machine improvements etc.
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- 2845 reads
The ups and downs of an 8 ft. neck
(of the giraffe!)
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- 1986 reads
Bacteria-popping surfaces!
re Cicada wings On the surface of the wings an hexagonal array of blunted spikes, nanoscopic pillars – don’t look potential killers; … a safe, non-chemical disinfectant!
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- 2447 reads
Biochemistry
— The extreme intricacy of the structure of living tissue!
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- 1465 reads
Biomimetics
The yellow desert scorpion survives when sand whirls, whips; electo-microscopy has shown fine detail that equips and halves the rate of sand-erosion (checked out by computer simulation)
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- 1420 reads
Biomimetics 2: “Shrilk”
A ‘plastic’ called shrilk, made from shrimps and silk: clever designers discovering Creator’s designs, mimicking. The cuticle of arthropods is an exoskeleton
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- 2115 reads
Brr!! Woof!! and Penguins
Brr!! Woof!! Why don’t the little doggies’ paws freeze when its icy out of doors? their pads have freeze-resistant fat but also, and on top of that
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- 2023 reads
Such Surprising Things (IP)
It is a suprising thing that birds can sing so well. It is a surprising fact to tell that they have tracked their way around our sphere – their brains do not appear sufficient size
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- 1869 reads
of crickets and grasshoppers …
Hear the little cricket ‘sing’, using teeth upon its wing (raised to help acoustically), ‘heard’ by membrane on its knee. Grasshoppers upon a farm –
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- 1918 reads
The Elephant’s Trunk
40,000 muscles in a powerful limb that can branches rip, pick a single pin, with its mobile tip, yet can dig for moisture, without skin’s rupture. It’s a long sucking nose
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- 2609 reads
Woodpecker’s shock-absorbers
Hammering rapidly: force on its head that is greater than 1000 g*. (If banged at just 300g, we’d be concussed, or our brains would be messed.) Specialised structure of bones and tendons,
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- 2133 reads
Leafy lifecycle
When comes the end of winter’s cold, squeezed-up tiny leaves unfold, … The cooling of late summer air activity triggers to prepare … When comes the end of winter’s cold …
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- 2008 reads
The Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder (IP)
… if such a fading face should smile, just like a Cheshire Cat a disembodied mouth profile we’d see – who’d fancy that?! …
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- 1777 reads
No more ‘junk DNA’
The ‘brain’ of each cell has DNA-genes, chemical coding builds, guides its ‘machines’. “Ninety-eight percent useless junk”, they thought , “– evolution’s left-overs
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The Plant Hopper’s Gears
The plant hopper hops from leaf to leaf, two legs together, or they’d come to grief, with a lop-sided jump they’d just have a bump, so the legs move...
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- 1919 reads
What those Galapagos finches don’t teach
Darwin observing natural selection of finches with different beaks, thought this a picture of life’s evolution, but there never was any brand new information …
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A is for Aardvark –
with a nose like a pig (though longer); it’s stronger, and able to dig; its burrow is made at speeds that exceed six men who are digging at speed...
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- 2965 reads
No Crash-Landings!
How does the busy little bee land neatly on the breeze-blown tree? The engineer scratched his head, ‘Why do our robots crash instead – we’ve done...
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- 2067 reads
Amazing Archer!
Hawkeye of the world of fishes, powerful arrow rarely misses: looking out from under water somehow knows just where it oughter …
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- 2052 reads
What am I?
I have a special bubble in my bladder …
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- 2750 reads
Brains
Thoughts struggle, buzz, boggle – intensive scientific gaze can’t grasp or fully know, the detail of activity in minute, infinitesimal maze, as...
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- 2366 reads
Weeds …
… may be destructive to perfect swards, but focus your view and see how attractive the shape and the hue, the markings and texture, the details of...
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- 1953 reads
Biomimetics (3) ‘Gecko-type’ tape
They imitate those gecko feet with their microscopic hairs* – the tape’s stick’s strong, but they can’t repeat attachment and detachment long …
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- 1207 reads
What Am I? (IP)
…and each season my changes will charm again
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- 1680 reads
Sleep Refreshment
but when we are asleep … removing bad things, internally flushing, refreshing and clearing the mind …
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- 1973 reads
What’s the odds? (IP)
of a series of unlikely events?
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How many molecular switches in your brain?
How many stars in the Milky Way? How many nerve links in part of my brain? How many switches, – well, now they can say more than the number of computers and routers,
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- 1082 reads
The tiniest motor
In all the trillions of your cells there are motors nano-size … they spin around, so squeezing … co-ordinated circles of chemical activity
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- 1745 reads
The Mimic Octopus*
This octopus can mimic as its body morphs like plastic: it can flatten out, and trail its arms, and swim like a banded sole; it can make itself look...
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- 1581 reads
That Myth!
There once was a myth that all fauna were derived from a kind of amoeba …
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Amazing ‘eyes’ that hypnotize
‘Eyes’ that mesmerize – apparent stillness in the midst of rattling tail of stunning iridescence …
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- 1426 reads
The Golden Ratio
Mathematical analysis of aesthetically pleasing shapes … golden ratio … beauty – why?
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- 1905 reads
???? …
How does a caterpillar change and all its innards rearrange into a dainty butterfly? …
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- 2281 reads
Mystery in the Chrysalis
How does the caterpillar change, and all its innards rearrange? Emerging from its egg with lumps, inactive miniscule disc-bumps to one day form leg-...
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- 1596 reads
Enablers for the special 10
…for sensitive surgery and superb creativity of music and art.
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Where did all our water come from?
… Their guess for this cooling sphere so hot doesn’t have a solution to how we have got these oceans so vast of this simplest solvent, their only suggestion that somehow it came by meteor or comet again and again impacts in their thousands battering the sphere … no ‘bang’ came from nowhere to make us appear …
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How does the little beetle spring?
More than 200g g-force experienced at take-off (– extremely extreme); and each time it can jump over 200 times its body length, (like a man jumping...
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- 359 reads
The Evolutionary-creation Myths
There once was a myth that mutations … There once was a myth of long ages … There once was a myth that ‘pooh-poohed’ … There once was a myth of a gradual emergence, from nothing, of animal and plant life evolving …
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- 313 reads
The Shrimp's Eye
Biomimetics 4) Deep in the bottom of the ocean (light level low) …they hadn’t thought of the ‘genius’ of the shrimp solution …
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- 922 reads
The Impossible Move
They seem to think life started in the sea – somehow, but plants appeared on land, and then – unplanned some moving creatures in the water thought...
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- 823 reads
How did it arise?
Exquisite the painting, admired, bestowed delight for the viewers and compliments flowed … but not to the artist whom none of them knew, though...
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- 236 reads
The lesser light
What a wonderful moon we have: silvery glow – we watch it grow and shrink, rise and glide, and slowly sink calm for lovers and travellers’ guide in...
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- 632 reads
Gadgets amazing!
Fingers sense touch detail, caress; delicately manipulate surgeon’s scalpel, artists’ brush, musical melodies fast and intricate. Nerve networks back and fore from … handle and use with care!
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- 590 reads
Diamonds of truth
I remember a child (about 8 years old) in Sunday School saying something like ‘It’s a good idea to say you believe in God – if it’s wrong you won’t...
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- 637 reads
The Age of Discovery
From new-born breath ’til still of death: Hearing sounds and conversation, gazing round in exploration … mouth contortions … life-long, look and think …
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The Amazing Molecule!
Surprising simple structure bafflingly suitable properties unusual medium essential for living cells for transportations and chemical reactions … and lighter when frozen … don’t stand on that ice until you know it’s thick enough, tough enough! But how is there so much on earth? …
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- 299 reads
Don’t say ‘cheese’!
Is it made from green cheese, that friendly moon up there? or did it from a young earth squeeze, or join us from elsewhere? The moon probes told us ‘...
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- 165 reads
Pacific Golden Plover
Golden Plover flies across the ocean – cannot swim, and so in constant motion, eighty-eight hours with no land to rest; somehow knows just how much...
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- 151 reads
Moving to new areas!
Dandelion’s parachute lifts the seed to travel far; sticky goosegrass*, hooked barbs of burs cling to clothes and hairy furs; berries – food-wrapped...
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- 236 reads
Squirting ‘cucumber’ …
Ecballium elaterium even makes David Attenborough laugh out loud!
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2 Super-sensory-sensitive scrubbing towers
One nose two tunnels through which the air flows as it goes …You value your mouth, ears, eyes, but do you despise your humble nose?
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- 246 reads
That long nose!
Starfish Girl suggested that as I had written on Nose, and she on Trunk, I should try one on the famous nose. This is a revision of an old one …
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On the 6500+ km journey, twice
I’m a tiny round egg in the Sargasso sea, and hatch to be leaf-like, on currents I float eastward to a continent very remote, many get eaten, but for...
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- 487 reads
They aren’t missing!
They used to think that soon they‘d find a ‘missing link’ between mankind and apes; they drew imaginative posture and facial shapes – all from discovered tooth – excitement big, – then found to be the tooth of a pig! Then …
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How does the spider catch its fly?
Little fly that flits around bumps into a web and bound by the glue, with silk wound round when by hungry spider found; but your mind it would...
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- 106 reads