On Do Tarantulas Shoot Sticky Silk Webbing Out Of Their Feet?
This is a paper from last year by Anne Peattie and Walter Federle. The Supplementary Data have videos of spider feet being dragged across some glass. Video S5 (upper right hand corner) clearly shows something fiber-like being extruded from the disputed foot structures.
The controversy continues.
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On Experiment Boring
I believe that Alcoa has a similarly long-running experiment in which they put some aluminum plates out on the roof of the plant decades ago and periodically check them for corrosion.
I think that, compared to the Alcoa experiment, the glacial rheology of pitch is positively riveting.
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On New Military Robots Specially Designed To Give You Nightmares
Rhex is a very good robot - one of the first to incorporate actual biomechanical principles instead of what engineers thought the biomechanics were.
It just happens that the cockroach was the model system for the original research.
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On Cellphones Are Creating The Monsters Of The Future
And to think the employees at the US Patent Office laughed (LAUGHED!) at my application for a intrauterine Faraday cage.
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On Will The Sun Kill Us All?
@Gef the Talking Mongoose Maybe just rename the Facebook photo album of the destruction orgy to something less apocalyptical?
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On Dartmouth's "Omelets Made of Vomit" May Not Exist :(
WELL THANK GOODNESS. The folks that we thought might be incorrigibly gross are still only marginally gross.
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On Will The Sun Kill Us All?
So....can we go back to worrying about pole shift now?
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On More Drunk People Answering Their Cellphones
"Binge drinking eclipses more genteel, 'drink all day' alcoholism in popularity, study finds."
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On Higgs and the Certainty of Physicists
I like this piece. It's like a short story about an (unseen) character called "Random Error".
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On Why Does Vinyl Sound The Best? A Chat With A Musician Who Knows
All acoustics aside, in a music marketplace where the product goes right from the artist to iTunes to a portable device, is there any point to cover art anymore? LPs give you large format visual art in addition to the sounds encoded thereupon, but on your 'puter you just get a tiny thumbnail. It might help as a visual cue to folks who browse like that, but if you become accustomed to some wordy, nested categorization scheme, then what's the point?