This is the remora fish, also known as the suckerfish, or the sharksucker, due to its powerful suction disc on its head which makes it capable of sticking and staying stuck even on fast-moving sharks and leaping dolphins. Its ability has made it a wonderful inspiration for scientific inventions.
Chinese scientists have now discovered how it works and, with colleagues in the US, have started adapting the same approach for use in robots.
[...]
Inspired, they engineered a biomimetic disc infused with vertical nylon fibres with electrostatic flocking, a technique that utilises an electric charge to align fibres.
Compared to pure silicon discs, these discs demonstrate an adhesion enhancement of 62.5% and show 3.4 times increment in attachment time, the researchers report in a paper in the journal Matter.
Unfortunately, as of the moment, the scientists could not yet copy the natural suction disc. Nevertheless, this new device could pave a way to new underwater robots which could travel the world attached to both whales and sharks.
Amazing!
(Image Credit: Klaus M. Stiefel/ Cosmos)
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or they just like, stop putting robots and plastic straws in the ocean entirely, i duno
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