Animal Enigmas
TED Radio Hour
00:00
The Mystery of Speed Mismatch
The speed mismatch was bothering us because if a Yankee pitcher throws a baseball, and they'll say, oh, it's going at 100 miles an hour. We were wondering if this insect is storing energy to do the surface tension just before launch. To test this, we did naturally what any of us would do, we converted our kitchen tables into a lab. So now we're going to place droplets on a speaker to squish them at high speeds,. And this is what we discovered. The water that flows in our faucets, like a liquid, at these tiny scales, due to surface tension, can get a kick, store energy. If you time it just right, you
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