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Crustaceans Help Build NASA's Exploration Skills

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Crayfish help NASA explore cosmos


Crayfish don't just blunder around in the dark bouncing off rocks but use a sophisticated sense of touch to form detailed mental images of their surroundings, an Australian researcher says.

Professor David Macmillan of the University of Melbourne has previously piqued the interest of NASA, which has applied his earlier work on the crayfish, or yabby (Cherax destructor), to developing tiny space exploration robots.

Macmillan says just as humans looking for the bathroom in the middle of the night grope around with their hands, yabbies in dark or murky waters use their antennae to orientate themselves.

They also use chemosensory receptors all over their bodies that allow them to detect chemicals in the water from food, mates or predators.

"We're trying to find out how crustaceans work out what their world is like," he says.

Yabbies are not renowned for having large brains, but Macmillan says his research, published in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, shows the crustaceans have an acute sense of touch that helps them to get around.

"People have made lots of assumptions that they're not that smart and they don't know what's going on out there but increasingly [we're] finding that they actually put together some pretty sophisticated pictures," he says.

Bubble wrap or sandpaper?



In the study Macmillan and colleagues put the crayfish into arenas containing different types of surfaces and structures including bubble wrap and sandpaper.

"Basically we asked the animals to tell us whether they could tell the difference," he says.

"What we're seeing is that they change their behaviour according to the texture of surfaces."

He says his team is the first to demonstrate that yabbies can discriminate between textures.

Crayfish in space



Macmillan's research feeds into the field of biomimetics, where designs found in nature are used in robotics.

A few years ago, he travelled to the US where he met NASA scientists developing miniature, independently moving robots to discuss his work on how yabbies move their tails.

Macmillan has just completed more work suggesting yabbies can analyse particular spaces before they enter them, and can even recognise places they've been before, and other crayfish.

"We now think we've got evidence that they can do very sophisticated analyses on a space before they even get into it, they can detect vibrations and they can remember what they've experienced before," he says.

stolen from http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1553770.htm
+5 / -0
7 years ago
i tell you a top secret but its the true!

Nasa is Disney Hoax Production.

Satelites dont exist.

And the earth is flat!

the round earth was installed from Freemansons (Phytagoras) and later Kopernikus.

Why install round earth?

Round earth tell you:

Big Bang Theorie
Evolutionstheorie (you are a monckey?)
Round Earth
Space
We are insignificant.

Its Satans lie...

All Hoax...
+5 / -0
7 years ago
I vote down cuz Lobs are food and not tools to help space explorartion


(Jk Jk jk jk)
+0 / -0
Skasi
7 years ago
Why is a post about scientific research on Lobsters in Off topic?!
+3 / -0

7 years ago
quote:
Satelites dont exist.

I sure hope this is a troll. But you never know 100%...
+2 / -0

7 years ago
B-b-but Owl is technically a ground unit!
+1 / -0
7 years ago
GBrankTheEloIsALie
ich weiss, dass hört sich auf den ersten Moment extrem absurd an.
Ja, das hört sich wirklich irre an.
ich weiß.

Aber die "Ball Erde" ist die größte Lüge.
Sie wird den Kindern eingetrichtert und sie glauben es.

Du kannst fast alle Phänomene die im hier und jetzt Möglich sind mit einer flachen Erde erklären.

+0 / -0
Firepluk
7 years ago
all hail crustaceans!
+2 / -0
Well this turned into a religion thread faster than expected. *hails crustaceans*

DErankXivender ich glaube dir schon, dass deine Scheibe funktioniert, aber kann sie die Bewegung aller Himmelskörper mit der Integration einer einzigen Formel erklären? (F = masse1 * masse2 / abstand^2) Es geht darum, das einfachste Modell zu finden.


Hier ist eine meiner Aufnahmen von Andromeda, ganz ohne Teleskop. Ist es nicht schöner sich das als Millionen von Sonnensystemen vorzustellen?
+2 / -0
7 years ago
Translate plz Deinfruend, my German is very bad..
+0 / -0
quote:
Du kannst fast alle Phänomene die im hier und jetzt Möglich sind mit einer flachen Erde erklären.

Du kannst auch alles mit "Gott wollte es so" erklären - und niemand kann das Gegenteil beweisen. Es hat sich aber herausgestellt, dass die wissenschaftliche Herangehensweise (Theorien werden nach ihrer Nützlichkeit zur Vorhersage beurteilt) uns zu deutlich hilfreicheren Erkenntnissen führt, und deshalb nehmen wir sie.

Deine "flache Erde" kann alles mögliche nicht erklären, und noch viel weniger vorhersagen. Du kannst sie gerne glauben, und wenn du sie immer weiter verbiegst wenn jemand dir zeigt warum sie nicht stimmt, dann kann sie auch nie jemand widerlegen (siehe oben). Aber alle werden dich belächeln, weil du dich weigerst, Ockham's Rasiermesser anzuwenden und deshalb vom Wissensstandard her in der Urzeit verbleibst.

In English: He actually believes the earth is flat.
+0 / -0
quote:
Nasa is Disney Hoax Production.

+0 / -0
7 years ago
+0 / -0

7 years ago
Thread is funnier is you read posts inbetween OP's paragraphs

[Spoiler]
+2 / -0
Well since we're linking related xkcds:



PS: CHrankAdminDeinFreund F = masse1 * masse2 / abstand^2 - you forgot a pretty important constant...

PPS: Wow... An arrow like <- breaks the format parser:
[url=google.com]test[/url]
<- [url=google.com]test[/url]
+1 / -0
That constant is only needed for your system of units, it's just about definition and doesn't affect the actual behavior of the system. I'm also aware that Newton fails for galaxies without dark matter as well as fast moving objects (mercury precession, gravity waves, black holes). But now all we've done is making it look complicated, while I wanted to show how easy it actually is to make good predictions with this model.

But there are never too many space pics on zk forum, so have some images of me getting rekt by humid air


and failing to stack


+2 / -0

7 years ago
quote:
That constant is only needed for your system of units

Incorrect, unlike some other constants, the gravitational constant has dimensions
So if you don't write it, your equations are wrong, which is a shame.
+1 / -0
Ok, you're right about that. How do I explain it? Magic dimension fixing constant?

I'm running out of andromeda pics :|


So have some planetary nebula but with way too little resolution


Trying to keep this thread space lobster looking.
+2 / -0

7 years ago
quote:
quote:
That constant is only needed for your system of units

Incorrect, unlike some other constants, the gravitational constant has dimensions
So if you don't write it, your equations are wrong, which is a shame.

Would this be legit?
 |F| = |masse1 * masse2 / abstand^2| 
+0 / -0

7 years ago
quote:
Would this be legit?
 |F| = |masse1 * masse2 / abstand^2| 

Not AFAIK
+0 / -0
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