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With its “wedge-shaped snout and countersunk lower jaw,” the sandfish is built to move through its sandy environment. However, scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology determine how the sandfish skink (Scincus scincus) uses its limbs and a wave motion to literally swim through its sandy environment. From Georgia Tech Research News (emphasis added):
A study published in the July 17 issue of the journal Science details how sandfish — small lizards with smooth scales — move rapidly underground through desert sand. In this first thorough examination of subsurface sandfish locomotion, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that the animals place their limbs against their sides and create a wave motion with their bodies to propel themselves through granular media.
“When started above the surface, the animals dive into the sand within a half second. Once below the surface, they no longer use their limbs for propulsion — instead, they move forward by propagating a traveling wave down their bodies like a snake,” said study leader Daniel Goldman, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.
. . .
“Since loosely packed media is easier to push through and closely packed is harder to push through, we thought there should be some difference in the sandfish’s locomotion,” said Goldman. “But the results surprised us because the density of the granular media did not affect how the sandfish traveled through the sand; it was always the same undulatory wavelike pattern.”
For a given wave frequency, the swimming speed depended only on the frequency of the wave and not on the density. Unexpectedly though, the animals could swim a bit faster in closely packed material by using a higher frequency range. The team also varied the diameter of the glass beads, but still observed similar wavelike motion.
By tracking the sandfish in the X-ray images as it swam through the glass beads, Goldman was able to characterize the sandfish’s motion — called its kinematics — as the form of a single-period sinusoidal wave that traveled from the head to the tail.
. . .
“The results demonstrate that burrowing and swimming in complex media like sand can have intricacy similar to that of movement in air or water, and that organisms can exploit the solid and fluid-like properties of these media to move effectively within them,” noted Goldman.
In addition to having a biological impact, this study’s results also have ecological significance, according to Goldman. Understanding the mechanics of subsurface movement could reveal how the actions of small burrowing organisms like worms, scorpions, snakes and lizards can transform landscapes by their burrowing actions. This research may also help engineers build sandfish-like robots that can travel through complex environments.
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A powerful image:
Untitled, (Hell). By Dash Snow, who recently died at 27. Via here and here.
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Despite failing to mention “the words pollution, emissions,carbon, or global warming” in her Washington Post op-ed, Sarah Palin manages to attack the national media:
Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges. So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be:
I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.
In her sky-is-falling rhetoric, Sarah Palin claims the energy sector will dry up but fails to mention jobs created by further developing the renewable energy sector:
Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.
Senator John F. Kerry refutes Palin at the New York Times:
“Yes, she manages to write about the climate change action in Congress without ever mentioning the reason we are doing this in the first place,” Mr. Kerry wrote. “It’s like complaining about the cost of repairing a roof without factoring in the leaks destroying your home.”
Mr. Kerry outlined the threats of climate change – including those facing Ms. Palin’s own state of Alaska – and also refuted her arguments that cap-and-trade legislation will cost jobs and hurt the poorest Americans.
“Palin confidently claims job losses are ‘certain,’” Mr. Kerry wrote, but “she somehow neglects to mention that jobs in our emerging clean energy economy grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs since 1998.”
Mr. Kerry was presumably referring to a recent study from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
More from the Huffington Post quoting Steven Benen:
As Steven Benen notes,
In an impressive feat, Palin managed to write an entire piece about energy policy without mentioning the words “global warming,” “climate change,” “carbon,” or “emissions.” There’s “no denying” the need to address the issue, but there’s also no explaining why. (She did, however, manage to work in the phrase “cap-and-tax” four times.)
Keith Olbermann’s critique of Sarah Palin’s Washington Post op-ed:
And from the Atlantic Online (emphasis added):
s Derek says, this is a bit like an op-ed on health care that doesn’t contain the words spending, costs, coverage, or medicine, or a high-school paper on Catcher in the Rye that doesn’t contain the words, um, Catcher in the Rye.
I find this absence sickening. Deciding how to deal with climate change is an uncertain and complicated process. It requires weighing costs in the present against benefits a hundred years in the future. It requires weighing costs in the U.S. against benefits in places like India and Bangladesh. It requires weighing concrete GDP against the moral emphemera of the world’s floral and animal diversity. And it requires sacrificing today to ward off uncertain and unquantifiable future risks. This tremendous empirical uncertainty demands reflection and humility.
And then you have Sarah Palin show up, blathering about how we’re “destroying America’s economy” while we’re “literally” sitting on mountains of oil and drill baby drill and blah blah blah. Sickening.
You can read Sarah Palin’s Washington Post op-ed here.
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There are still things out there to discover. It makes you wonder, what else is out there?
More about this discovery can be found at National Geographic and the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.
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