What's the information about bionics?
Colorful butterflies, such as those with double moon patterns, those with brown veins, especially those with fluorescent wings, have golden wings, green wings and blue wings in the sun. Scientists have brought great benefits to military defense by studying the color of butterflies. During World War II, the Germans surrounded Leningrad in an attempt to destroy its military targets and other defense facilities with bombers. Schwarzenegger, an entomologist in the Soviet Union, put forward the principle that the color of butterflies is not easy to be found in flowers, and covered military facilities with butterfly-like camouflage. Therefore, although the Germans went all out, the military base in Leningrad remained undisturbed, which laid a solid foundation for winning the final victory. According to the same principle, people later produced camouflage uniforms, which greatly reduced the casualties in the battle.
The constant change of satellite position in space will cause a sudden change of temperature, sometimes the temperature difference can be as high as two or three hundred degrees, which seriously affects the normal work of many instruments. Inspired by the fact that the scales on butterflies automatically change their angles with the direction of sunlight to adjust their body temperature, scientists have made the satellite's temperature control system into a louver style with great differences in radiation and heat dissipation ability between the front and back of the blades. A temperature-sensitive metal wire is installed at the rotating position of each window, which can adjust the opening and closing of the window with the change of temperature, so as to keep the internal temperature of the satellite constant and solve a major problem in the aerospace industry.
-Beetles and bionics
In self-defense, this beetle can spray high-temperature liquid "shells" with foul smell to confuse, stimulate and intimidate the enemy. After dissection, scientists found that there are three chambers in the beetle body, which store dihydric phenol solution, hydrogen peroxide and biological enzyme respectively. Diphenol and hydrogen peroxide flow into the third chamber and mix with biological enzyme to have a chemical reaction, which instantly becomes venom at 100℃ and is quickly ejected. This principle has been applied to military technology at present. During World War II, the German Nazis made a new engine with huge power and safe and reliable performance according to this mechanism, which was installed on cruise missiles, making it fly faster, safer and more stable, and improving the hit rate. London, England suffered heavy losses when it was bombed. American military experts have developed advanced binary weapons inspired by the principle of beetle spraying. This weapon contains two or more chemicals that can produce toxins in two separate containers. After the projectile was launched, the diaphragm broke, and the two poison intermediates mixed and reacted within 8 ~ 10 seconds of the projectile's flight, producing deadly poison at the moment when it reached the target and killed the enemy. They are easy to produce, store and transport, safe and not easy to fail. Fireflies can directly convert chemical energy into light energy, and the conversion efficiency reaches 100%, while the luminous efficiency of ordinary electric lamps is only 6%. The cold light source made by people imitating the luminous principle of fireflies can improve luminous efficiency by more than ten times and save energy greatly. In addition, an air-to-ground speedometer based on beetle apparent motion response mechanism has been successfully applied to aviation.
-Dragonflies and bionics
Dragonflies can generate local unstable airflow different from the surrounding atmosphere through the vibration of their wings, while Wells uses the vortex generated by the airflow to lift himself up. Dragonflies can soar under a small thrust, not only forward, but also backward and left and right, and its forward flight speed can reach 72 km/h. In addition, the flight behavior of dragonflies is simple, and only two pairs of wings keep flapping. Scientists have successfully developed a helicopter based on this structural foundation. When an airplane flies at high speed, it often causes violent vibration, and sometimes even breaks its wings, causing the airplane to crash. Dragonflies rely on aggravated wing moles to fly safely at high speed, so people follow the example of dragonflies and add weights to the two wings of the plane to solve the thorny problem of vibration caused by high-speed flight.
-Flies and bionics
Entomologists found that the back wings of flies degenerated into a pair of balance bars. When it flies, the balance bar vibrates mechanically at a certain frequency, which can adjust the movement direction of its wings. It is a navigator to keep the balance of flies. Based on this principle, scientists have developed a new generation of navigator-vibrating gyroscope, which greatly improves the flight performance LlJ of the aircraft, enables the aircraft to automatically stop the dangerous rollover flight, and automatically restore the balance when the body is strongly inclined, even when the aircraft is in the most complicated sharp turn. The compound eye of a fly contains 4,000 single eyes that can be imaged independently, and objects can be seen within 360 degrees. Inspired by the fly's eye, people made a fly's eye camera consisting of 1329 small lenses, which can take 1329 high-resolution photos at one time. It is widely used in military, medical, aviation and aerospace fields. Flies have a particularly sensitive sense of smell and can quickly analyze dozens of smells and respond immediately. According to the structure of flies' olfactory organs, scientists have converted various chemical reactions into electric pulses, and made a very sensitive small gas analyzer, which is widely used in spacecraft, submarines, mines and other gas components, making the safety factor of scientific research and production more accurate and reliable.
Bees and bionics
Beehives are composed of hexagonal small hives arranged neatly, and the bottom of each small hive is composed of three identical diamonds. These structures are exactly the same as those accurately calculated by modern mathematicians-rhombic obtuse angle 109 28' and acute angle 70 32'. They are the most material-saving structures, and they are large in capacity and extremely strong, which makes many experts admire them. People imitate its structure and make honeycomb sandwich structural plates with various materials. This structural plate has high strength, light weight and is not easy to conduct sound and heat. They are ideal materials for making space shuttles, spaceships and artificial satellites. Polarizers sensitive to the direction of polarized light are arranged adjacent to each single eye of the compound eye of bees, which can be accurately positioned by the sun. Based on this principle, scientists have successfully developed a polarized light navigator, which has been widely used in navigation.
-Other insects and bionics
Fleas have a high jumping ability, and aviation experts have done a lot of research on it. Inspired by its vertical take-off, a British aircraft manufacturing company successfully manufactured a Harrier aircraft that can take off and land almost vertically. According to the structural characteristics of insects' single compound eyes, modern television technology has created a large-screen color TV, which can also be composed of small color TV screens. Some specific small pictures can be framed at any position on the same screen, and the same picture can be played as well as different pictures. According to the structural characteristics of insect compound eyes, scientists have successfully developed a multi-aperture optical system device that is easier to find targets, and it has been applied in some important weapon systems abroad. According to the mutual inhibition principle of some aquatic insects compound eyes, an electronic model of lateral inhibition is made, which can be used in various photographic systems. The photos taken can enhance the edge contrast of the image and highlight the outline of the image, and can also be used to improve the display sensitivity of radar, and can also be used for the preprocessing of text and picture recognition systems. Based on the processing information of insect compound eye and the principle of directional navigation, the United States has developed an engineering model of terminal guidance seeker with great practical value. Japan has developed new construction methods of construction machinery and buildings such as hexapod robots by using the morphology and characteristics of insects.
-Prospects for the future
Insects have evolved gradually with the change of environment in the evolution process of hundreds of millions of years, and they are developing their own survival skills to varying degrees. With the development of society, people are more and more aware of various life activities of insects, and more and more aware of the importance of insects to human beings. Coupled with the application of information technology, especially the application of the new generation of computer bioelectronics technology in entomology, a series of biotechnology projects, such as biosensors developed by simulating insect's perceptual ability to detect the types and concentrations of substances, and computers developed by imitating brain activities with reference to insect's neural structure, will turn scientists' ideas into reality and enter various fields, and insects will make greater contributions to mankind.
-How much do insects know
Mosquitoes are the most harmful insects to human beings, causing 3 million people to die from malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever and other diseases every year.
Ants are the most powerful insects. They can support 300 times their own weight.
Flea is the champion of high jump, and the jumping height is 200 times its length. This is equivalent to a person jumping 400 meters.
Locust is the insect with the strongest flying ability. It can fly continuously for 9 hours.
The largest food eater, moth larvae, can eat 80000 times of their body weight within one month after birth.
A silkworm can spin a fiber more than one kilometer long.
The fastest moving insect is the tropical cockroach, which can move 40 ~ 43 times its length per second, which is equivalent to a person's progress per second 130m.
Polygonum viviparum is the fastest winged insect, which can flap 600 million times per second.
The insect with the biggest contrast is the butterfly produced in Africa, which is beautiful, but smelly and highly toxic.
Moth is an insect with a sensitive sense of smell, and its male moth can smell the smell from the female moth more than ten kilometers away. Although the pheromone released by the female moth is only 0.000 1mg.
The insect with the most eyes is the dragonfly. Its compound eye consists of 28,000 single eyes.
The most industrious insect is the bee, which tirelessly looks for pollen and nectar all its life until it dies.
In a beehive, a honey room made of 40g wax can hold 2kg of honey.
Bees must collect nectar from 2000 flowers to produce a teaspoon of honey.
Fireflies are insects with the best light energy conversion rate. They can convert 90% energy into light energy. The energy conversion rate of the light bulb we usually use is only 5.5%.
The smallest insect is a North American insect, which is only 0.25mm long and can go straight through the eye of a needle.
The largest insect is the arthropod Bambusa bambusa, which is produced in Indonesia and has a wing width of 33cm. Another Indian silkworm moth has a wing width of 30cm.
The most primitive insect in appearance is cockroach, which has hardly changed for 250 million years.
Termites contain 60% protein, while steaks only contain 15%, so more and more people eat insects. It can be predicted that termites will be one of the important sources of protein for human beings in the future.
The most beautiful insect is a flower scarab in COLEOPTERA, which has gold, sapphire, smoke black, lemon yellow, pink and bean green, and shiny purple tentacles, which is very harmonious. It is said that each can sell for 50 thousand dollars.
The most species of insects are COLEOPTERA. Scientists predict that there may be more than 3 million species on the earth, but there are nearly 500,000 recorded species, accounting for almost 30% of the total number of known animal species and half of insect species.
From the perspective of bionics, the most studied insect is the fly, and its bionic achievements in many aspects, such as eyes, feet, balance bar, sucking mouthparts, immune ability and flying skills, are applied to many aspects of human life.
Eupolyphaga (Carabidae) will spray corrosive gas mixed with hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone at a temperature of about 100℃ to drive away intruders. It shoots 20 times in a row like a gun, with a range of 5 cm, which is four times its body length. This beetle will not be harmed by heat or corrosive gases.
The insect with the highest IQ is the bee. A beautiful scientist is adding sugar to the white square on the ground according to the rules of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 ... When he finished adding 32 and was preparing to get to the 64th square, there were already many bees waiting there. The scientist said gloomily, "I don't know whether I am experimenting with them or they are experimenting with me." . This discovery proves that some animals also have the ability of abstract thinking.
The cruelest and largest war between insects happened between ants, and I have witnessed such a thing myself. In an area of nearly one square meter, there are all our common ants. They are fighting fiercely, with countless casualties. It is said that the scale of ant warfare in South America is much larger. This kind of war scene is not easy to see.
Insects and bionics
A robot called "bionic fly" may cause a revolution in battlefield surgery. This will be the first robot that can be brought to the injured soldiers and give them emergency treatment on the battlefield, because it is too dangerous for surgeons to operate on the battlefield.
Previous surgeon robots were very limited because they were carried by wounded soldiers.
When the bionic fly finds the wounded, it will open its motor-driven arm and operate under the guidance of a doctor who may be hundreds of miles away. This new robot is the first to use both arms for remote surgery.
This robot will be displayed at the international medical simulation and education conference in The Hague later this week.
Telesurgery uses cameras, 3D video images, stereo and remote tools and force feedback to control robots. When the surgeon moves the tool, the bionic fly's arm will imitate. When the robot touches the soft tissue, the surgeon feels resistance through force feedback.
It has been used as a training aid by American military doctors and has performed some complicated operations on animals.
bee
There are many kinds of bees. Some bees live in a colony of about 12 bees, while others live alone. The most social bee is that there can be as many as 80000 bees in a hive.
The most distinctive feature of beehives is beehives. Many beehives are connected together to form a beehive. Each hive is hexagonal, which is a three-dimensional shape. Compared with other shapes, it saves wax and labor.
Part of the hive is used to store food, that is, pollen and nectar collected by bees from flowers. Nectar turns into honey in the hive. All the eggs are laid by the queen bee. The queen bee lays an egg in each hive. Next, these eggs will be taken care of by female worker bees.
Each hive is made of wax secreted by bees. Bees use their mouths and forelegs to knead wax for processing.
When a worker bee flies from one flower to another, it will store the collected pollen in the pollen blue of its hind legs.
A beehive has many beehives, and the wall thickness of the beehive is the same. Workers who build hives will pierce the wall with their tentacles to see how much they pierce, so as to judge the thickness of the wall.
-discover the ant "vampire" and solve the mystery of ant evolution
A carnivorous ant colony was found in Madagascar. According to scientists on Tuesday, ants are the most successful insect species in the world, and the carnivorous ants discovered this time will play a very important role in solving the mystery of ant evolution.
This kind of ant looks terrible. The person who found it named it Dracula ant. When they are hungry, they will suck the juice of their larvae to supplement their nutrition. This behavior is considered to be an evolutionary behavior between ants and wasps millions of years ago.
Brian Fisher from California Academy of Sciences found these carnivorous ants in a rotten stump 55 miles outside Antananarivo, Madagascar.
Among the known insect species, although ants are weak, they are the most widely distributed on the earth, and the number exceeds that of any living thing on the earth. Researchers want to know what makes ants evolve so successfully.
Madagascar is an island country in southeast Africa. Because of its relatively isolated ecological environment and lack of competition from new species, some older or "relic" species can survive here, so this island country has always been regarded as a treasure with rich biological information.
The ant "Drakula" was first discovered in Madagascar in 1993, but this time Fisher's discovery is the first discovery of this ant living community. This will let scientists know more about the evolution of ants. Fisher thinks that there is a certain connection between Dracula ant and early wasps.
In this ant colony, when the queen and worker ants are hungry, they will go to the young ant room in the cave and make a hole in the young ant to absorb their body fluids and get nutrition.
Fisher explained that this is why he named the ant "Dracula", which means vampire. He said: "We think this is a very cruel act of killing each other."
He believes that the future research on "Dracula" ants will enable scientists to grasp more clues about the development of ant behavior. Finally, scientists can reconsider all their ideas about ant evolution. "These preliminary findings tell us that people's assumptions about ant evolution are inaccurate at present. The most important thing about this discovery is not that we have discovered a new species, but that it is very important to help us solve the mystery of life evolution. "
-From butterfly wings to counterfeit banknotes
In the eyes of ordinary people, butterfly wings and anti-counterfeiting banknotes or anti-counterfeiting credit cards are completely different things, and there is no connection at all. However, as long as you patiently read this essay with less than 1000 words, you will understand that there is karma in it, and you will also see another wonderful use of bionics. Please read on!
The so-called bionics is a subject that studies how to imitate the structure and function of living things to make equipment or objects that benefit mankind. A report published by the British magazine Nature about the color formation of a butterfly wing living in Indonesia not only shows us the mystery of nature, but also opens a bionic idea for us to develop newer anti-counterfeiting banknotes that bad guys can no longer forge.
By chance, physicist Vuvisic of the Thin Film Photonics Laboratory of the University of Exeter in the UK and two other colleagues began to study the wings of a butterfly called Papilio several years ago. The wings of this butterfly were originally yellow and blue, but they turned into sparkling green to human eyes. They observed the wings of the butterfly with a microscope and found that the wings of the butterfly were covered with concave holes. These pits are too small, only 0.4 cm in size, with yellow bottoms and blue slopes. Uwisik explained why the wings of Papilio are green in people's eyes: when the light hits the bottom of the pit, it is reflected into yellow, while the light hitting one slope of the pit is also reflected, but this reflected light is incident on another slope and then reflected. At this time, because the pit is too small, the human eye can't distinguish between the blue light reflected twice around and the yellow light reflected, so it feels green. In addition, they also found that these two reflections also changed the polarization direction of light, which the human eye could not distinguish, but insects such as bees could detect. Explaining the polarization direction of light really requires some professional knowledge. A simple but inaccurate explanation is the direction of photon vibration in electromagnetic field.
If we ordinary people discover these secrets, it will probably be nothing more than a high-five to admire the magic of nature and nothing else. However, Uwisik and others think of counterfeit money. At present, they are studying how to imitate the wing structure of the butterfly. They are not satisfied with the small pits on paper money or credit cards, so that no matter how similar the counterfeit money looks to the real money, they will never have the technology of covering the counterfeit money with small pits with the same distribution and size as the real money. As long as we use special optical equipment to emit polarized light and look at the polarization direction of reflected light, it will be difficult to distinguish between true and false, and our hard-earned money will not be cheated away by swindlers again. Do you think butterfly wings have something to do with anti-counterfeiting banknotes?
-Silkworm: the ideal "insect factory" in the future
Silkworm, native to China, produces the best natural fibers and has made indelible contributions to beautifying human life. With the high development of biotechnology, it may become an "insect factory" to produce advanced drugs and other useful substances in 2 1 century, making new contributions to mankind.
The Institute of Filariasis Agricultural Technology, established by Japan's Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Tsukuba Science City, is engaged in the research of using silkworms to establish an "insect factory". Scientists here have basically developed all kinds of "equipment" and processes necessary for the "insect factory" for silkworms, such as transgenic silkworms that produce useful substances, automated silkworm rearing systems, and freezing and thawing body fluids.
For example, the genetic engineering laboratory led by Toshiyuki Tamura successfully cultivated luminous silkworms by implanting jellyfish DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and green fluorescent protein gene as markers into the chromosomes of silkworms. This achievement means that if the gene of green fluorescent protein is replaced by the gene of other useful substances, silkworm can become the "factory" of this substance.
As an "insect factory" for producing advanced drugs, the breeding environment of transgenic silkworms must be kept highly clean. Therefore, the Institute has developed an automatic feed manufacturing and supply system. It consists of an artificial feed manufacturing device, a multistage circulating transgenic silkworm feeding device and a feed supply device. The whole process is also controlled by computer, which can automatically adjust the indoor temperature, humidity and air. Due to unmanned operation, foreign debris, bacteria and viruses will not enter the room. This automatic system can raise 20 thousand silkworms, and the production scale of "insect factory" is considerable.
Compared with E.coli and ants, silkworms are relatively huge. But it is an insect after all, and a silkworm can produce very few useful substances. How to efficiently extract useful substances from transgenic silkworms has also become one of the topics in the technical development of "insect factory". Hiroshi Miyazawa, a scientist, developed a "method of freezing and dissolving body fluids" by using the phenomenon that frozen larvae (mainly Lepidoptera insects) shrink in size after dissolution. In this method, the transgenic silkworm under anesthesia is placed in 70% ethanol and frozen at MINUS 30 degrees Celsius. In this state, the silkworm's ventral foot is cut off, and then it is moved to a buffer containing an anti-melanin agent for melting, and useful body fluids will flow directly from the place where the ventral foot is cut off due to contraction during melting. The advantage of this method is that special equipment and complicated procedures are not needed, and the useful substances produced in silkworm can be preserved for a long time by freezing. Scientists used this method to extract 370 ml of body fluids from 500 silkworms, which was quite efficient. His liquid collection method has applied for an international patent.
Shibin Kitamura, head of the institute and doctor of agronomy, told the reporter that "using insect function" is one of the main research fields of the institute, and various departments are studying about 50 kinds of insects such as dragonflies, ants, locusts, elephants, bees, sweet potato moths, unicorn, Periplaneta americana and Spodoptera litura. The purpose is to make use of their unique tissue structure, cranial nerve system, reproductive function and motor function to make new materials (such as amino acid separation membrane, artificial skin, anticoagulant material, bone bonding material, antibacterial protein, antithrombotic drug, immunocompetent substance, etc.). ) and the development of bionic technology (such as the manufacture of biosensors, biochips, micromechanics and behavior control technologies for pests, livestock and fish, etc. ). Using silkworms to establish an "insect factory" is one of the key points.
Kitamura believes that silkworms are very suitable for use as "insect factories". The reason is that the silkworm is very big and has a large number of silk glands, the organs that make protein. So far, scientists have studied silkworms from the perspectives of physiology, biochemistry and genetics, so it is easy to develop technology. In addition, the silkworm can't fly, so it is easy to be isolated and managed, and the safety is high. So far, there is no precedent of using transgenic technology to transform and utilize silkworms in the world, and the research of Japanese scientists is groundbreaking.