Tag: camouflage

Pacific Leaping Blenny – Fish Lives on Land

By Anupum Pant

Scientific name: Alticus arnoldorum

After having seen animals that live on for centuries, fish that have legs and several others, another fascinating animal joins the list at AweSci today. The Pacific Leaping Blenny – A fish that, unlike every other extant specie of fish, lives on land.

Wait! What?

The Pacific Leaping Blenny is a 2-4 inches long fish that is found on reefs in Samoa, Marianas, Society, and Cook Islands, in the western and southern Pacific Ocean. For all its life, this fish stays on land. It breathes through its gills and partly through its skin.

During the few hours when the tide is at a normal level, such that the waves are just strong enough to reach them and not enough to pull them back into water, these fish take care of their business on land. They need the water to hit them because it keeps their skin wet. Which in turn, lets them breathe through their gills and skin. As long as their skin is moist, they can live out of water indefinitely. So much that they have been officially classified as a terrestrial specie. They would suffocate if their skin dries off completely.

Their fascinating camouflage

It is fascinating to see an existing example of how ancient sea dwelling creatures must have first evolved. At these times when we have great predators waiting on land to immediately end this transitional specie, this fish does a great job of hiding itself from them. And given their poor speed on land, that is how they survive on these rocky shores. They have developed a specialized kind of camouflage that makes it difficult for a predator to find and kill them. As you can see in the picture above, they have a skin color that matches very well with the surrounding reefs/rocks.

How do they move on land?

Since they don’t have legs, that is exactly the question that hit my mind when I first read about these creatures. Turns out, for movement on land, they have developed a very peculiar kind of a movement style. They twist their tails, load up the tension and then release to leap. This sequence happens too quickly to notice easily through naked eyes. So, picked off directly from the Wikipedia page, here we have a slow motion video of this fish leaping off.

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4D Printing is Here

By Anupum Pant

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We had just started getting comfortable with printing objects in 3D, and 4D printing is already here. Early this year, in the month of April, Skylar Tibbits, an architect, designer and computer scientist at MIT, gave a revolutionary demonstration explaining their advances in the field of 4D printing at a TED conference. This was an initial proposal and it got things moving at a rapid pace.

Side note: In the world of 3D printing:

What is 4D printing?

At first 4D printing sounds like a catch phrase, it isn’t really just that. 4D printing is actually 1D better than 3D printing and it aims at making objects out of a 3D printer, that can reconfigure themselves into useful shapes, on their own. For instance, think of a non-living stick changing itself into a 3D cube as time passes. In short, 4D printing will enable us to create living objects without any living cells, micro-processors, chips or batteries involved. Sounds simple enough, but the promises are nothing less than extraordinary.

In the TED talk attached below, Skylar explains how a string of plastic placed in water can turn itself into the letters MIT. But, this was something that happened back in April. Things have moved further.

A few days back, Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder revealed a successful test of their 4D printing technology. They were able to print out flat objects using normal plastic combined with a smart material which was able to turn into a cube on its own. Cubes are just the start.

According to scientists, in the future, 4D printing will probably churn out smart car bodies that would heal automatically, smart soldier uniforms and advanced building materials. Imagine a camouflage material that changes to match the surroundings, that could be the future. Or a pipe that contracts and expands to move water without pumps. Or a building material that builds itself into a structure. 4D printing could probably best suited for building in an extremely hostile environment like space. The possibilities are endless.

But, let us not get ahead of ourselves. It is almost impossible to predict what we’ll actually see in the future. Things have just started to happen in the field of 4D printing. But, it sure looks amazing. What will you build?