Slashdot Mirror
Howto - Flying Snakes
Ant writes "Wired News' Furthermore mentions a University of Chicago researcher finally figured out exactly how the limbless reptiles pull off their amazingly effective bird imitations. 'Despite their lack of winglike appendages, flying snakes are skilled aerial locomotors,' said biologist Jake Socha. Here's how: First, they flatten their bodies from head to tail, making themselves 'Frisbee-like in form,' Socha said. Then, as the snake drops (or leaps!) from a tree branch, it sends S-shaped waves through its body, steadying itself as it glides through the air. One species can even turn mid-flight. There is more information, photographs, and even short QuickTime video clips on Jake's Flying Snakes Home Page."
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Mirror of the flying snake "takeoff" and "gliding" videos.
(The author has also stated "You may use this video footage for non-publishing purposes without permission" on his web page. Not sure how much load it can handle, so I figured I'd mirror it. The author's page has more information and commentary; these are just the raw videos. They're very small, so there's a good chance his server could have handled it just fine.)
for the link to quicktime. I've been looking all over for that...
OK... I hated snakes BEFORE they could fly.
*shudder*
$0.02 (CDN)
But that server is going down like a stone...
I stole this Sig
so much as plummet."
-Monty Python
(Ok, it was sheep. but after watching those videos, I think it fits.)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
That's what I've been hearing on the Discovery etc as long as I remember...
Thank God for that Quicktime link!
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Badgerbadgerbadgerbadger...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Just wait till you see the one's that can swallow a man whole.
Birds have ultra-light bones, do these snakes too?
hmm
Tastes like chicken.
Ignorance is amusing, stupidity is annoying.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The secret to flying is throwing yourself at the ground and missing. Full quote
Amazing how familiar this seems. Almost as if it had been on Slashdot yesterday.
"Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?"
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
...that no-one ever decides to cross one of these things with a cobra...
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
...but can I teach a Shark to do that? What about a sea-bass?
I tought that this was supposed to be an howto. What am I to do with the snake and dead pigeons now?
It's not even really gliding. More like a controlled fall.
They should call them Newton Snakes or something.
They finally figured them out!. Now if I strap enough of these flying snakes to my arms I'll be able to fly!
And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And thou shalt fling thyself from trees in a pathetic attempt at flying, and thou shalt hurtle towards the earth faster than thou canst say, "Holy Crap!", and men shall laugh and point fingers and cry out, O, silly snakey pooh! Erm, "paraphrased" from Gen 3:14
In none of the movies did I see a snake fly. In 2 of the videos, I did actually see them fall at an angle, which I've also seen humans do with certain suites, before deploying their parachutes.
And in most videos, I just saw snakes fall, something ALL vertibrates and invertibrates are capable of.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
'Flying Snake Howto' pfft.
I was all pumped up for a meat-modding exerciose that told me how to convert my existing snake into a flying one with cool neons and shit.
It's just a stupid science article.
And here is born a new class of troll. At least it's a new topic, even if not terribly imaginative. I hereby name you the single-minded singularity troll. :-)
That is, of course, unless you are a mass-mind. :-)
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
It's a new species of troll.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Flying snake - looks like more of a controlled fall.
Flying Squirrel - not really flying, but one hell of a long jump.
Flying Fish - Really, truly looks like it's flying. It's not just an extra-long jump.. they litereally glide over the water, just like a bird flying low.. for up to 100m. I've seen them in person, it's insane.
Therefore I declare that the flying fish is the only one that really deserves the name.
You might have seen a housefly, maybe even a superfly, but I bet you ain't never seen a snake fly!
Oooh! Oooh! I want to join the mad rush to quote the hitchiker's guide!
um...um..."a towel is the most useful thing in the universe...it can be used to ward off snakes...and other such creepy flying varmints that might attack you from strange angles."
Is that right?
They just stick out some webbing and catch the wind and float off, right into your face.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Seeing snakes trying to fly, or seeing humans running *towards* them like their life depended on it.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
So, for everyone else out there, no, it's not flying.
BUT that doesn't change the fact that this is really really wrong. These are snakes. They slither, they crawl, and they fall. They are not supposed to actively be able to leap off of trees or maintain any semblance of glide and control while airborne. God/Allah/He/She/It/Goat took away its apendages for a reason...and now this?!?
So what happened? What brought this about? Why are they in trees? Why will I never be able to go visit those south/souteast Asia countries after seeing this?
I don't just have to worry about the trees I'm under, but the trees withing 30 feet of me. (depending on height of course).
Yeah, dumb old Chicago. Does Fermi ring a bell?
Bit more important than anything I've seen from Harvard.
If I am ever accused of being single-minded, it had better be for transhumanism.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
[grin] :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
... about flying snakes (the one in small plane in the first movie doesn't count!). :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Well... in World of Warcraft they do exist according to this screen capture. [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Though he'd be a poorer man if he never saw an eagle fly.
-- John Denver
[I saw an eagle fly once. Lucky for me, I had my eagle fly swatter - Ed.]
Personally I doubt that you had a lot of snakes falling out of trees and going splat. This seems nearly as naive an interpretation of evolution as Lamark's.
:-)
Instead, I suspect that you have a situation like this: when the equalibrium is punctuated it fundamentally changes the environmental niches which are available. For example, if oyu have a drought, this changes the niches that the animals are forced to occupy. If oyu have a mass extinction, you have a lot of vacant niches, etc. If you have a year of abundance, niches get subdivided, etc.
I suspect that a group of snakes found themselves in a situation where they were able to live off the lizards in the trees and decided to stay there. If they fell, it probably hurt, but I doubt it was often lethal. However, those that could control their angle of descent would have had an advantage evolutionarily based on this control simply because it takes a lot of energy to climb back up the trees, one is more vulnerable, etc. So it is a series of very small steps not a couple of big ones. But these steps occur over a comparitively short time period. And lo and behold, the snakes fly
As a say, natural selection is the process of adapting a species to an ecological niche. The evolution seems rapid at first, but once things are stabilized, you don't see much.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
Because then:
1. A lot of beautiful women would owe me sex.
2. Cleveland would win the World Series.
3. My boss would make me a vice president.
4. My dotcom options would be valid and profitable.
5. Slashdot posters would be lucid and intelligible.
6. George Lucas would retire the StarWars franchise.
7. Microsoft would GPL their entire code base.
8. SCO would fully support OSS once again.
9. The RIAA/MPAA would make financial restitution to all their victims.
10. ???
11. Profit-...! Umm, where was I again?
Solomon Kevin Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Stupid flight cancellations...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
so how do I actualy build one of these?
I think it was on Discovery Channel I saw it, but they had snakes in a zero gravity plane (vomit comet). I believe they were trying to see if snakes would know which was was "up" during the free fall and level themselves off. Most snakes tumbled out of control, a few managed to "glide".
Refer to the third truth.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"Indiiiiiiie!"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Where was the oligatory "no animals were hurt in these clips" caption? Personally, I think putting snakes up high trees,cages, wires, etc and telling them "fly, or else.." is sort of cruelty. But, darn, they are snakes. Throw them higher. Somewhere, sometime, a lemming will learn to fly. Is this related?
No shit? I don't want to be around when some mad scientist crosses one with this.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Do you really want to keep playing?
Most exciting phrase in science: not "Eureka!" but "Hmm... That's funny..." -Asimov (abridged for \. limits)
that's all you do - bird imitations?
with cats.
They just stick out some webbing and catch the wind and float off, right into your face.
That is precisely the reason why I always wear a helmet with a full face shield. Oftentimes I will also carry a (mostly) full can of RAID.
And some eye drops.
I've found that anything flies if you throw it hard enough.
Given enough money pigs can even fly First Class.
Doh.
10. The lions would win the Superbowl!
How do the snakes know what an S is shaped like?
// This is not a sig.
Flying snakes made it onto Slashdot, but Fingerworks going out of business didn't.
"Slashdot, News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
The above is not worth reading.
I think there are many who would disagree with your comment on the Nobel. It think it is pretty hard to argue that a prize that goes to one group once a year is being given out like candy. Usually that implies that there are many out there. Given out like the lottery would be fair statement, but I would still guess that many would disagree.
Now as to this idea that most people haven't heard of Chicago: I do not disagree at all. However, to claim that what the hoi polloi know is a good measure of quality is pretty weak. People at top levels of academia, buisiness, law, medicine, etc. all know about the University of Chicago, and it is highly respected there. I think you might be confusing US News with a measure of quality.
I want to be quite clear here. I am not arguing that Harvard is not the best school in the country. It may well be, and graduates of it always seem quite determined to self-validate by making a big point of such rankings. However, to suggest that any school consistently in the top 20 is "hardly a significant player" is an untenable position.
BTW, what are oppritunities? Because if that is what Harvard is giving out, I don't think I want them.
Most exciting phrase in science: not "Eureka!" but "Hmm... That's funny..." -Asimov (abridged for \. limits)
The other (final?) point is that to look at Chicago as a "college" is really missing the boat. The graduate population dwarfs the undergraduate, and since we were originally talking about a grad student's research, that was where my comments were focussed.
Chicago is not Harvard. Harvard is not Oxford. And none of them are the University of Kansas. I can make trivial statements too!
Most exciting phrase in science: not "Eureka!" but "Hmm... That's funny..." -Asimov (abridged for \. limits)
"Wired" may have just heard of this, but this story came out months ago. Just because "Wired" seems to be out of the loop, does /.?
You know what else you can't predict? When somebody is making a fucking joke. Lighten the hell up.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
And I thought that this was going to be a Robotic Snake mod.
The Economics of Website Security
A few random comments about these postings:
o ns.html -- there are many more details about the snakes' trajectories, particularly in the latest papers (2005).
Regarding the mirror of my site--thanks. The was so much traffic this weekend that the server was brought down. When I called the company, they said, "So YOU'RE the problem here..."
Gliding is a form of flight in which the flier can only move downward. Thrust is required to move upward. As was suggested, it would be very interesting to learn if a flying snake generates thrust (though not enough to overcome its weight).
I actually tried to use a contrasting sheet on the ground to improve the visuals, but the snakes would have none of it--they would glide anywhere but there. They have good vision, and seemed to prefer natural settings. I spent countless hours squinting while analyzing video, trying to make out white spots on a green and black snake against the green grass.
"Ultra light bones" The paradise tree snake is better gliders than its cousin the golden tree snake, and the paradise tree snake on the whole is less robust. I would like to test the idea that its bone structure is different (particularly, thinner-walled), but I haven't gotten to that yet. Similarly to many scientists, I have a long list of things I'd like to work on...
Regarding the "does it really" line of questioning: all gliders take a curved trajectory. At the end of the trajectory, the glider is moving at a shallower angle than at the beginning. For some of my snakes, they reached a glide angle of 13 degrees from the horizon. Not anywhere as good as a bird (2-4 degrees) or a man-made glider (even better), but impressive for an animal that in reality is a cylinder. I also suggest you look at some of the publications at http://www.flyingsnake.org/publications/publicati
-Jake Socha
Oink, flap. Oink, flap. Oink, flap.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
They both said it.
Woody first, when Buzz 'flew' around the room on the celing fan.
Buzz said it near the end of the movie when the were gliding down to Andy in the car after the rocket exploded.
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams