Why 6-Legged Bots Rule   By Tom McNichol              Full
oversees a lab that's a sort of gymnasium for bugs and other
varmints, containing some of the same equipment used to study
human gait, only in miniature. A handful of SGI workstations
running 3-D musculoskeletal modeling programs visualize motion
data, analyzing animals in motion and breaking down their
movements. The creatures are everywhere. Scorpions, with a
highly stable gait that has evolved over 400 million years,
scurry about. Cockroaches and centipedes are given a workout on
tiny treadmills as a way to examine which muscles they use and
how much energy they expend. Crabs scuttle across tiny scales
that measure the various forces their legs generate. A gecko
climbs smooth Plexiglas plates as high-speed video cameras,
shooting at a rate of 1,000 frames per second, unlock the
secrets of the reptile's amazing ability to crawl up almost any
surface.   To the untrained eye, running bugs on tiny treadmills
seems like the sort of project that could wi