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Just when you thought that wings were for flying
...
think again …..
Many animals, e.g. dogs and insects, have
an amazing sense of smell and can detect vanishingly small quantities
of chemical signals with great specificity and spatial resolution. Shown
here is a non-flying moth known as Bombyx mori – it fans
its wings solely to enhance the sampling of chemicals (scents)
in the environment. |
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Dr
Antoinette Tordesillas (a mathematician from the University of Melbourne)
in collaboration Dr Catherine Loudon (an entomologist from the University
of Kansas) developed a mathematical model of airflow around antennae
hairs to understand how insects “sample” a scent. Their
work could one day help develop robotic chemical sensors for a variety
of applications. Imagine the lives saved if we had small robotic
insects that could fly into the tiniest of spaces and help detect survivors
buried deep in the rubble after an earthquake, or a building explosion …
Loudon, C, and Tordesillas, A. (1998) “The use of the dimensionless
Womersley number to characterize the unsteady nature of internal flow", Journal
of Theoretical Biology 191, 63-78. |
