Ballooning spiders rely on electric fields to generate lift | Hacker News Reader

Ballooning spiders rely on electric fields to generate lift

arstechnica.com

100 pointspseudolus19 comments

If anyone has a chance to see the foot of a spider under a good macro lens, I strongly recommend it. They're unnaturally cute: https://www.google.com/search?q=spider+foot&tbm=isch&hl=en-U...

Indeed!

And it looks like Marvel Comics didn't do proper research when they developed the SpiderMan figure.

When I was eight years old, I read the children's book "Charlotte's Web".

Charlotte is a spider, and at the end, she produces a sac of baby spiders that hatch and fly away.

Ever since then, I've been terrified by the idea of hordes of superintelligent flying spiders swarming around a human.

I hope they are FCC certified and don't produce EMI.

eh just stick a ferrite bead on it.

What kind of camera was used here to make the video of the take off. Is it discarding color information to increase resolution?

The paper says it is a 'digital camera', a dark sky could imply an ultraviolet sensor - but on second look it appears to be just an inverted grayscale image, possible near-infrared but I would assume the image modification is just for improved visibility/contrast rather than special recording techniques. Here is the image in non-inverted mode:

https://imgur.com/FBsuos1

i wonder what part of that image caused the adult content warning.

It looks like a thermal camera

Are you sure? It looks more like some sort of Schlieren imaging setup.

I don't think it's a Schlieren setup. As the article notes, they had dust/smoke being emitted by the platform to show the wind.

I’m fairly sure, it looks very similar to the cams we use in the security industry. And the colouring matches what I’d expect in a thermal cam. But I could be wrong, I’m just going on how it looks!

Spiders using electric charge, bacteria eating electric charge; the future is now and advanced biotechnology exists in nature. This is worrying in an inspiring way.

Nature is advanced technology. Look at the trillions of micro-machines that operate inside of us - we're full of nano-bots. Obviously I'm taking liberty with the terms machines and bots, but ever since I started thinking about nature as technology it's made me appreciate even the dullest looking moss, a tiny ant carrying a crumb or weeds sprouting between cracks in the pavement.

If anything, the smaller an organism, the more it can take advantage of Van der Waals force, static, bioelectromagnetics.

Slightly related to the article, I watched a jumping spider crawling on my bench jump off the edge and curve its trajectory to land on my stainless steel dishwasher which was to the right of its initial jumping arc - I wonder if it was able to use the hairs on its body to create a static response or even as control surfaces.

It's all relative, so many people claim "Nature is too slow" and "We need to kick nature in the throat with AI because evolution is too slow."

We have spines that expire far before we do, knees that make most enterprise design-by-committee solutions look simple in comparison, and a passage where the food and air goes through.

We also have heads so big they often cause pregnancy complications and hips that don't go wide enough for those heads to pass through (you can attack this problem from either side).

I guess the cherry on top is incompatible long-/short-term mating preferences that lead to devastating consequences for ourselves and our kids.

Nature might be advanced technology but wow it sure makes suboptimal choices and often. You can retort saying nature doesn't have mind but then you probably shouldn't call it advanced tech which ipso facto requires purpose & plan.

> Nature might be advanced technology but wow it sure makes suboptimal choices and often.

When it comes to suboptimal choices based only on path dependence and institutional intertia, nature has nothing on humanity's computing infrastructure. :P

Nature knows how to kill unviable code.

One of the worst is the human shoulder. Sneeze wrong and you've got an impingement and a tear.

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