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RESEARCHERS FROM TRINITY College Dublin have discovered that the bones of certain insects and crabs are designed in such a way as to make them stronger than those of humans.
The exoskeletons of grasshoppers and crabs – indeed, all arthopods – are made of cuticle. Professor David Taylor of TCD’s Bioengineering centre said that this exoskeleton “protects the animal like a knight’s suit of armour”. Cuticle, he explained this week, is one of nature’s toughest materials.
An interdisciplinary team examined why the exoskeleton is so effective – and found that the legs of the aforementioned grasshoppers and crabs have the ideal shape to resist bending and compression. If human legs were built the same way, they could be twice as strong, the research found.
Professor Taylor and colleague Dr Jan-Henning Dirks used a special computer-tomography machine to generate X-ray images of insect legs and compared that data to that collected from crabs and human bones. The results were published in an article in the Journal of the Royal Society, Interface. In it, they stated that human leg bones are thick-walled tubes while the legs of insects and crabs have proportionately a much thinner wall.
Taylor said:
This relation of wall thickness to radius can tell us a lot about the mechanical stability of the structure. Imagine the bones as simple tubes. Now, if you had a limited amount of material, what would you do? Would you make a thin solid rod or a hollow, thin walled tube? When compressed, the rod might easily bend like a straw, the hollow tube however might buckle like a beer can.
The team found that the leg-shape of crabs “represents an ideal compromise to resist both the bending and compression forces the crab experiences when walking under water.” The grasshopper leg is optimised to withstand the bending force when it jumps. The human thigh bone, however, was less able to deal with bending pressure.
You can read the paper here and decide for yourself if an exoskeleton (rather than the endoskeleton we have now) would be the best design for a human…
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One stormy night in the lab I decided to make soup. Not any soup. This was a dangerous genetic soup of mankind and beast. Following Knorr’s online recipe of one part man, two parts grasshopper and 250g of carefully weighted crab DNA I drank it down. Hmmmm I thought, this tastes like chicken. I am now the indestructible, pole vaulting, long jumping crabhopper man.
Grasshopper tastes like shrimp, not chicken.
The application for funding has gone in for next years research. Groundbreaking study into the difference between small and far away. Can’t wait to find out!
You should get funding too
Well done Professor Taylor and Trinity Bioengineers.
Jays…. I remember learning this in fourth class. Maybe these boyos were mitching that day….
People this is where technology starts. Understanding the basics that are already out there. Knowing that one day the optimal design to engineer limbs (albeit mechanical) to aid in human activity. Somewhat like an ‘iron man’ suit without the jet pack and guns obviously, imagine what a rescue worker could do with that after an earthquake?
My week is complete knowing this life changing piece of info. FFS
If onle scientists had the ethical nous of grasshoppers…
..they might refuse to collaborate with the military-industrial complexes for developing technologies of mass human extermination on the off-chance of a prosthetic spin-off justification for their careers.
Or postpone looking for water on Mars until they had arrested the expanding desertification of the Sahel.
Homo habilis trumps homo sapiens still.
have your say