Found: The First Mechanical Gear in a Living Creature

Link to the Popular Mechanics article

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With two diminutive legs locked into a leap-ready position, the tiny jumper bends its body taut like an archer drawing a bow. At the top of its legs, a minuscule pair of gears engagetheir strange, shark-fin teeth interlocking cleanly like a zipper. And then, faster than you can blink, think, or see with the naked eye, the entire thing is gone. In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g'sa rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand. At top speed the jumper breaks 8 mphquite a feat considering its body is less than one-tenth of an inch long.

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How awesome is this!?

It's also about 10% of a wheel. Odd it never caught on.What next, a tripod?Of course, it's more evidence of design......

Of course the real question is how to get something like this installed on my own legs.Does the Designer know how long before He figures out how to port this technology into his more appreciative creations?I have a strong feeling that that little piss bug is taking his gears for granted.

Hell, I'd settle for the designer just fixing the flaws in the original design like some padding on the shins and over the funny bone. I'm not even asking for major changes and improvements just fix the manufacturing defects.

I remember seeing Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about the familiar old "why do we breath through the same tube we eat through?" question (the problem being it leads to choking), and he had a great point: 'its not like its asking too much, dolphins already have it'Yup, indeed.

Well, it does make speech a whole lot easier. Not only dolphins. Many other animals have separate breathing and eating tubes.They also can't talk.

Neither can pigs.Nothing talks except humans. That includes all of the animals that have unified breathing/speaking holes.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

And if they cant use their voice they can also sign

Easier? How would you know?I understand the workings of the anatomy, but what are you comparing against to determine which has more ease? Thanks for being vague. Are you just talking about other Cetacea? 'Cause he was just speaking to an audience and making some light humor, we wouldn't expect him to be very thorough. But dolphins can. And they're really smart. So its not that big of a stretch, which was his point.

Yes and no. Talking is pretty talking much defined as a human thing.But I think we could consider other animal's somatic auditory communications as "talking" in the sense that they're communicating information to one another with noises from their mouths.

Artificial mechanisms have been constructed to compare the efficiency and utility of various setups for speech systems. The findings are always the same: The 90 positioning of the pharynx against the oral cavity allows for the most robust (=complex) system of sound production. This positioning is only achieved through, among other things, lowering of the breathing tube below the entrance to the combined tube (with the side effect that food must always pass by the breathing tube). Well, I was just speaking to some strangers on a forum replying to some light humor. So there's no need to expect me to be very specific. We've had other threads on this, but I can say here that no evidence of a communication system with complexities even slightly like those of human language has ever been found in non-human creatures.Now I expect about a dozen or so shoddy videos of chimps farting cleverly and playing guitar; but those videos are anecdotal and produced by highly biased 'researchers' (=animal trainers).

But your nasal passages could just go around all that and connect directly to the lungs. Now you can breath and eat at the same time. I expect you to intend to be understood. That's beside the point that its not that big of a stretch for an intelligent designer to give us a breathing tube separate from the eating one.But let's talk about this mechanical gear instead.

Huh?Where the hell would all the air come from that we use to speak? And I was understood. Where's the problem? But the eating tube and breathing tube have to connect to get the air from the lungs to pass through the oral cavityan essential process in the production of human speech sounds. It's pretty cool. I wish I had one, or even several. But I imagine it would turn to mush in an instant trying to move any of my large and heavy body parts.

The same way it does now. You'd have an additional tube for nose-breathing. You weren't understood. I still don't know what animals you were talking about. We could have two breathing tubes. Especially if you were using it at the speeds this bug does. But you could employ it much slower and be okay. It'd prolly be helpful for lifting a lot of weight.

We eat through the same hole we speak out of. Without changing that, there isn't any way to get the lungs to supply the speaking apparatuses with air unless we cross tubes somewhere. It was just a general point that it is rather common for creatures to have separate breathing and eating tubes. I think we can rest that there. But so long as the eating hole is the same as the speaking hole, at least one tube from the lungs will have to somewhere cross paths with the digestive tract.You can't get around it. You could maybe make it safer, but even then it would be difficult to do so without seriously altering the utility of human speech. It seems that to 'wind up' the system would take as much energy as the system would give off (probably more). I think the advantages really come from the gear's ability to store a large amount of energy and release it rapidly in a higher concentration.