The electrostatic world of insects(wired.com) |
The electrostatic world of insects(wired.com) |
Very cool article. For example: butterflies accumulate a positive charge when beating their wings, which causes pollen to jump through the air toward them when they land on flowers.
https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf https://swizec.com/blog/week-9-life-at-low-reynolds-number/
When you are very small (like an ant), it is the other way around.
Toss a mouse from a building. It will land, shake itself off and scamper away. But if similarly dropped, “… a rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” So wrote J.B.S. Haldane in his 1926 essay "On Being the Right Size." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27082
How complicated would it be for a small insect to explain gravity, if they're not normally affected by it in their daily routine?
I recently thought about something similar: it seems like at certain scales, things turn into spheres, based on applicable forces. And then there are in-between regions with chaos. Atoms seem mostly round. Humans are not. If planets and stars are at the next spherical scale, are there even larger structures out there that once again show spherical nature, once you're past galaxies, clusters and filaments?
For a much more enjoyable reading experience (at least on mobile):
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidden-world-of-electrost...
Interesting that ticks literally get pulled like a magnet towards their targets due to electrostatic forces.
This article has multiple videos of it:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)...
It's arguably kind of weird that this is just being noticed now. I suppose possibly modern camera equipment helps, for purposes of actually _seeing_ it happen...
Voltage is merely the "pressure" that charged particles experience. Voltage alone tells you nothing about how much charge is actually available once electricity is allowed to flow. And that's where the harm comes from. For static electricity, when you touch something, you get maybe a microcoulomb, once, and it's gone. For a power socket, you get up to 16 coulombs per second continuously.
In the same vein, if your carpet gives you a static shock, that's likely going to be thousands of volts. But obviously there isn't actually a lot of energy stored (all you did was convert some friction), so there's next to no amperes, little work the electricity can do, and thus no harm.
When you hit a flying insect with a zapper you are supplying a high potential and low potential electrode. The insects body completes the circuit and the stored voltage is routed through the insect, rendering it a flightless blob of goo.
This is all so fascinating!
https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Galvantula_(Pok%C3...
Yes, Pokémon has tons of real life weird biologycs inside. Such as that volcano snail, (Slugma/Magcargo) which exists IRL:
https://www.wired.com/2015/02/absurd-creature-of-the-week-sc...
I did some amateur research on spider ballooning many years ago and I believe part of the lift comes from rising air dragging along the silk thread. From my calculations, it wasn't enough to lift the spider on its own, but it might allow the spider to fall slower than the convective air currents were rising.
We are awash with EM radiation of almost all frequencies from the universe. A little 5G probably isn't our biggest problem.
Besides, this article is more about electo-static forces, and how, when you're very small, these are much more significant than the gravitational force, which makes sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception
There are other electromagnetic type things too, like use of light (camouflage, bioluminescence, eyes) and electricity (electric eels, bioelectrical cues for stem cell differentiation).
EDIT: Also the literal electrical potential within cells: the membrane potential, that is the voltage difference between inside and outside every cell.
An interesting area!
Also there are critical points. You can't have any arbitrary mass of hydrogen in space, at some point it collapses ant starts to burn.
I guess humans have changed the mix of wavelength we are exposed to a bit. E.g. more RF radiation from phones and base stations. But I'm not sure how significant those changes are in the overall 'background EM fields we live in'.
So 3V isn't going to pose any real risk unless it's applied internally and right across a critical nerve leading to your heart or a muscle directly on the heart. For reference pacemakers are generally set to 2-3 volts. Applied externally up to ~12V is generally considered low enough voltage there's a low risk of truly adverse effects.
His entire rig at one point delivered >80k amps, but he's fine.
10 milliamps across your heart can kill but using Ohm's law we can calculate 3V / 0.010 A to get a resistance of 300 ohms. This means you're probably still going to have a bad time if you apply it directly across your heart during open-heart surgery but other than that 3 volts just isn't enough to drive a lethal current through your skin.