Hummingbirds in a Wind Tunnel

IFLS has posted an article about hummingbird flight, that includes a really cool video---including of how they adapt to being in a wind tunnel. Very cool!

Modelling Human Butts

The Improbable Research Blog has highlighted an abstract on modelling of human buttocks. This was presented last December at the 7th Australasian Congress on Applied Mechanics, and surely this is a very important topic in mechanics. And if you look at the first reference in the bibliography, you'll notice that it is my Dong et al. :)

The Mechanics of Fingernail Cracking

I have managed to further savage a couple of my fingernails and toenails lately, so that made me wonder about their mechanical and growth properties (and, more particularly, if I have done additional permanent damage to them). I hadn't gotten around to googling this yet, but todat's issue of mini-AIR has helped answer one of my questions. (I'm actually pretty amused that an issue of mini-AIR, meant to make us laugh and then to make us think, has managed to do that. It doesn't usually have blurbs about things in which I already knew I was interested. Now I can just cross my fingers and hope that time does a bit of desavaging...)

"The Passion of the Cockroach"

The last talk of the workshop was a neuroscience/biomechics talk by Phil Holmes of Princeton University (one of the bigshots, by the way). The example of the day concerned cockroach locomotion, which has been studied extensively in the Berkeley laboratory of Bob Full.

I have seen Full speak oin various aspects of this topic a couple times -- he is a wonderful speaker! -- and there are a number of really awesome videos associated with this project.

I tried to find a video online relevant to this blog entry, but I could only find the old ones (and none of the really good old ones). Some of you might have heard me carry on about this series of projects before---I know I have mentioned the great videos of how roaches run over obstacles really well, can recover from perturbations like a small rocket being fired from a launcher on their back, etc.

OK, so whence my title? Well, one of the motivational videos for this talk showed a cockroach running along a treadmill with a thing on its back that looks like a cross. And the speaker casually, dryly referred to this video as "The Passion of the Cockroach." I approve!