Register Log in  Scientific Method / Science & Exploration
Synthetic jellyfish a hybrid of rat hearts and plastic  An
artificial version manges to match the real thing's performance.
Harvard University and Caltech  With billions of years of
tinkering behind it, biology has a bit of a head start on
engineers, creating materials like geckoes' feet and spider silk
that have remarkable properties. So some materials researchers
have studied biology's output in order to try to match its
performance, with a few notable successes. Now, a team from
Caltech and Harvard have put together a device that's a mixture
of biological material and plastic, and tweaked their design
until it could swim like a jellyfish.  Swimming like a jellyfish
isn't necessarily the most useful ability to have, but the
simplicity of the jellyfish body plan makes for a somewhat
easier engineering problem, and makes for straightforward
comparisons between the performance of the test construct and
the real thing. Plus, the research team has set