The ability to quickly maneuver through a variety of environments requires a central nervous system that can rapidly transfer sensory and motor signals. The neck connective, a bottleneck in the information traveling from the brain to the thorax, is being sectioned and imaged using transmission electron microscopy. These incredibly high resolution images show that, among […]
Other Research Topics
The convergent evolution of blinking in mudskippers and tetrapods
Approximately 360 million years ago, tetrapods colonized the terrestrial environment. This water-to-land transition is marked by a suite of behavioral and morphological adaptations. Among these was the origin of blinking—the occlusion of the eye by one of more membranes. Blinking behaviors cover the cornea is a fluid film, which is important for epithelial cell health, […]
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Evolution of whale body size
How big were ancient whales?Body size is perhaps the most obvious functionally important feature of an organism, yet it is complexly determined by many genes and environmental factors. Understanding body size trends through time and correlations with evolutionary transitions and ecology can give insight into characteristics of the process of evolution itself. Body size has […]
Gecko adhesive hairs gets stickier the faster they slide
Even geckos encounter perturbations and environments that can challenge their ability to stick. The hairs of a gecko’s foot are composed of dry, hard keratin. Classic physics predicts dry, hard solids to have frictional forces that decrease at the onset of sliding (kinetic friction is less than static friction). We discovered that gecko adhesives actually […]
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Flexible multielectrodes for recording from insect muscles
This is a post about resolving multielectrodes in cockroaches
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How do geckos stick to almost any surface?
Back when Simon was an undergraduate at Lewis & Clark College, his first experience with research in biomechanics was working with Prof. Kellar Autumn (visit him here!) to figure out how geckos stick. It turns out that gecko feet are covered in millions of tiny hairs called setae. Each of these hairs branches into 100-1000 […]