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"I wrote many novels which … contained the element of the projected collective unconscious, which made them simply incomprehensible to anyone who read them, because they required the reader to accept my premise that each of us lives in a unique world."
- Philip K. Dick
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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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- Artificial Jellyfish Swims On Its Own
- Festo's AquaJellies 2.0
- Squid-Like Robots Soon To Be 3D Printable
| Implosion Fabrication Shrinks 3D Objects To Nanoscale |
| ODYSSEUS Solar-Powered Stratospheric Plane Flies Forever |
| Phil Nuyttnn's City Under The Sea |
| Stick-On Tape Speakers, As Predicted By Bruce Sterling |
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