Robots That Bounce on Water

inghamb87 writes "The way water striders walk on water was discovered years ago. The insect uses its long legs to help evenly distribute its tiny body weight. The weight is distributed over a large area so that the fragile skin formed by surface tension supports the bug on the water. However, the ability of water striders to jump onto water without sinking has baffled scientists, until now." If nothing less, you need to see the picture: it's awesome.

Comments

Re:Speculation, speculation

[dotancohen]

Really, it's that bad. It's not only in science, I see bullshit super-accurate results where the data is so foggy that it makes me angry. Case in point: last week I told the wife to pull over so that we could fill up. The needle was buried below E and the gas light was on. She said "not now, there's another 62 kilometers in there". The computer has a kilometer-to-empty feature. You know how that bad boy works? It's got a float in the gas tank on an arm connected to a potentiometer. Even assuming that the gas level stayed perfectly level, and the arm did not move with the vehicle movement, and the potentiometer was 90% accurate, and the driving conditions were constant and always have been, I doubt that the thing could be accurate to +-10 kilometer. The engineers had real nerve trying to imply accuracy to the kilometer. That, or there's a 2.5 meter scorpion working at Ford.