Thousands of fans stormed to theaters over the first weekend of March 2024 to watch Denis Villaneuve’s highly anticipated Dune: Part 2. Incredible sci-fi visuals filled the big screen, including the fascinating Ornithopter, an aircraft that flies like a dragonfly. With so many modern aircraft inspired by biological flight, what makes insect-like flight, characterized by rapid flapping movements, difficult to engineer?
Model of an Ornithopter, a sci-fi aircraft created by Dune author Frank Herbert that resembles a dragonfly.
This question drove my fascination with insect wings and their unique biomechanical properties. They can perform complex aerial maneuvers, remain stable in turbulent environments, and sustain long flight times—all with tiny, delicate wings. We’ll dive into the mechanical and biological factors that make this possible and explore how understanding insect flight paves the way for possible engineering applications such as micro air vehicles (MAVs).
All jokes aside, our respiratory health is something most people take for granted every day. Quite literally, there is a colloquial phrase that exists to motivate people to do a task so often, that it comes as naturally as breathing. However, we do not control our breathing as much as this phrase suggests. In fact, when we are not paying attention, we do not control our breathing at all. Our autonomic nervous system performs the vital functions of inspiration and expiration for us of breathing in and breathing out. Without such a system, I surely would not want to fall asleep at night! But what happens when our respiratory health declines? How do we support people’s respiration when their bodies are not able to? Our answer is ventilators.
It is no secret the danger head injuries can pose for player safety in contact sports. While the public is aware of the danger of large hits and concussions, many remain unaware of the danger small blows to the head can have on an individual. Formally, these incidents are known as subconcussive impacts, which are defined as blows to the head that result in mild brain trauma without the presentation of typical concussion symptoms. Recent studies have indicated repetitive subconcussive impacts can lead to cumulative, long-term brain damage. This discovery has been increasingly alarming for rugby players who can average 77 of these impacts per game! With the discovery of this newfound danger, the question must be asked: what is being done to protect at risk rugby players?
But what if I told you that scientists are working on advanced 3D in vitro cell culture models that could bridge the gap between traditional 2D cell cultures and animal testing? These innovative models can potentially revolutionize drug development, saving both time and money.
Every 25 seconds, someone is killed in a car accident, resulting in more than 1.25 million deaths worldwide each year.
Photo by Wikimedia Commons, Dynamic Test Center
As a result, dummies are an important tool used in many safety tests for car crashes, and they help to inform many design decisions for automobile manufacturers. Since these dummies are used to assess human behavior in many types of situations involving collisions, swerving, and other performance measures, the primary goal for dummy creators is to imitate human response as closely as possible using artificial means.
Therefore, biomechanics plays an integral role in dummy design, from choosing materials that accurately reflect limb stiffness, to assembling ball-and-socket joints that sever when undergoing a certain threshold stress or strain. There are many techniques that researchers use – from computational models to in-field testing – to ensure these dummies reflect the parameters and properly inform the design decisions they are a part of.
Photo by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
Manufacturers routinely spend millions of dollars each year to develop and fine-tune the dummies (or more technically known as anthropomorphic test devices or ATDs) that they implement in their testing procedures. Its history can be traced all the way back to 1949, where the US Air force implemented a dummy for test ejection seats, while they were first implemented commercially by General Motors more than 30 years later. They have undergone many advancements in terms of their accuracy and manufacturing efficiency, arriving at the now ubiquitous Hybrid-III model, which resembles a 50th percentile adult “family man” malethat is used in almost all testing simulations. Although many cadever models have been explored, these artificial models offer the most consistent and reliable solution to testing needs, which involves blunt head-on crashes, various types of rollovers, and other rear-based and side-based collisions. By equipping dummies with different kinds of sensors, primarily consisting of MEMs accelerometers and other force transducers, dummies provide predictive power on the impact of different simulation parameters on driver safety and other outcomes.
Photo by National Geographic on Youtube
Dummy performance analysis can be found both in creation of the dummies, ensuring the dummies have the correct human mechanical properties, and in dummy testing, anticipating damages in crashes. Both see a heavy cross-section in biology and mechanics, best illustrated by the head-drop test in the initial development stage. Here, a dummy head undergoes a drop from a predetermined height, and sensing systems ensure the model has optimal weight and damping properties in comparison to in vivo concussion testing. This way, when the commonly used QMA Series 3 DoF Force Transducer later measures neck whiplash force (the most common cause of car crash injury), testing models can be confident such data will reflect real-world collisions. These kinds of before and after tests are used in all parts of the dummy, from parts as large as the lower back, to parts as small as the hinge joint in a finger knuckle. Such precision is needed in all areas to increase the predictive power of dummies, since details like Young’s Modulus (a measure of stiffness) in the chest area affects steering wheel impact displacement, while the coating paint consistency affects the skin abrasions associated with friction and rubbing. Each part of the dummy is crafted meticulously, and as such, the manufacturing and design process of the dummies involves a fast knowledge of physics, biology, and everything in between. Some additional overviews and readings can be found here and here.
You might be familiar with fixed-wing drones, which are popular for filming and photographing. But have you thought about the bio-inspired flapping-wing robots? Researchers who study how bats fly are trying to apply the knowledge to the development of next-gen flying robots.
You might be familiar with fixed-wing drones, which are popular for filming and photographing. But have you thought about the bio-inspired flapping-wing robots? Researchers who study how bats fly are trying to apply the knowledge to the development of next-gen flying robots.
What do birds and washing machines have in common? Shockingly, it’s not the ability to wash clothes. Rather, most birds and washing machines are great examples of vibration isolation systems.
There you are, sitting in the park eating your spaghetti picnic on your favorite picnic blanket when your pollen allergy acts up. You let out a sneeze powerful enough to compete with Aeolus’ bag of wind, but now your spaghetti is all over your favorite picnic blanket. You immediately go to rinse it off, but your fine Italian sauce has thoroughly soaked in. If only nature had a solution to keep a surface clean. Enter: the lotus leaf.
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to walk on walls? If you’ve ever watched a Spiderman movie or watched a gecko maneuver around its habitat, you probably have. While geckos don’t fight crime, their climbing ability is as fantastic as that of any superhero. Geckos have one of the most unique climbing adaptations of any animal, and scientists are examining the source of this ability to see if human technology could one day achieve something similar.
