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"I started writing in the 1930's when I was eighteen years old. And deep inside me I'm still eighteen and it's still 1938."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Chemotactic Artificial Jellyfish | ||
| Artificial device modeled on jellyfish capable of seeking specific components of liquid. |
Tug is a dedicated student of jellyfish. He creates increasingly accurate models of jellyfish on his computer, and then manufactures small models using piezoplastic microbeads sintered by laser beams. Finally, the discovery of a new material lets him create an artificial jellyfish.
| "...about the size of a deflated football. I dropped it in my swimmin' pool. It was floatin' there, kinda riplling and pulsing, for about two days. Didn't you say that sucker would run for weeks? Forty-eight hours and it was gone!..."
"No way," protested Tug, intensely. "It must have slipped out a crack in the side of your pool. I built that model to last three weeks for sure! It was my best prototype. It was a chemotactic artificial jellyfish designed to slither into undersea vents and find its way to underground oil beds..." [Tug] "My jellyfish didn't send back information because I didn't put a tracer chip in it... I don't think oil prospecting is a very honorable application. I'd really rather see the California Water Authority using my jellies to trace leaks in irrigation and sewage lines." |
| From Big Jelly,
by Rudy Rucker (w/B. Sterling). Published by Four Walls Eight Windows in 1994 Additional resources -
|
"Chemotaxis" refers to the ability of an organism to move in the direction corresponding to a gradient of decreasing or increasing concentration of a substance.
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- Cybernetic Jellyfish Evolve
- Artificial Jellyfish Swims On Its Own
- Festo's AquaJellies 2.0
- Squid-Like Robots Soon To Be 3D Printable
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| Implosion Fabrication Shrinks 3D Objects To Nanoscale |
| ODYSSEUS Solar-Powered Stratospheric Plane Flies Forever |
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