Francine Prose presented her lecture as part of the Townsend Center for the Humanities' Forum on the Humanities and the Public World. Prose is former President of the PEN American Center and author of over 16 books of fiction, a book on Anne Frank, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. Currently a visiting professor of Literature at Bard College, Prose has written for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Atlantic Monthly, ARTNews, the New York Times, among others, and she is a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine.
Our fear and disgust that cockroaches can quickly squeeze through the tiniest cracks are well justified, say University of California, Berkeley scientists.
Full Story: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/02/08/cockroach-inspires-robot-that-squeezes-through-cracks/
Not only can they squish themselves to get into one-tenth-of-an-inch crevices, but once inside they can run at high speed even when flattened in half.
These are just a couple of the creepy findings from a UC Berkeley study of how American cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) penetrate the tightest joints and seams in less than a second.
What the researchers found has inspired a robot that can rapidly squeeze through cracks — a new capability for search-and-rescue in rubble resulting from tornados, earthquakes and explosions.
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