Good morning,
Today’s forecast for the Whippet City calls for a cloudy day, with a high temperature of thirty-four degrees.
It’s Spirit Day at Whitewater Middle School, and Market Day at the high school.
Wired has a intriguing video posted about how animals like the sandfish lizard swim through sand.
The team found sine-wave-like movement allows the lizard, and their [model] robot, to push forward in sand, but creating computer models for the experiments proved problematic. Simulating all of the tiny sand grains required a lot of money to purchase time on powerful computers. So, the team performed the same experiments using 3-millimeter-wide glass beads instead of sand.
“We wanted something easy to simulate that had some predictive power. We got lucky, because it turned out [the lizard and robot] swim beautifully in the same way through larger glass beads,” [Georgia Tech’s Daniel] Goldman said.
Via Video: Secrets of Swimming in Sand Revealed | Wired Science | Wired.com.