How a Worm Gave the South a Bad Name

<p>Hookworms once sapped the American South of its health, yet few realize that they continue to afflict millions.</p>

The Daunting, Dangerous Task of Unearthing Colombia’s Landmines

<p>
</p>
<p>
 In 2016, the longest-running conflict in the Western hemisphere drew to a close. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos signed a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, ending 50 years of violence that had seen hundreds of thousands killed and 7 million Colombians driven from their homes—the
 <a href="http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2016/6/5763b65a4/global-forced-displacement-hits-record-high.html">
  highest number
 </a>
 of internally displaced people the world as of 2016.
</p>
<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 However, many Colombians still feared returning to the countryside, thanks to war’s other lasting legacy: landmines. While no one knows how many mines pepper the country, from 2008 to 2014, Colombia suffered the world’s second-highest landmine mortality rate. Only Afghanistan had more deaths. Victims have since dropped from a high of over 1,000 per year to fewer than 100, but the country is still considered to be
 <a href="https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Landmine_Monitor_2017_Embargoed.pdf">
  heavily mined
 </a>
 .
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/img_2087.width-990_s3gbVgn.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The Colombian military donated deactivated landmines to researchers at the National University of Colombia for testing.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 The first step to eliminating the mines is finding them. Mine detection technologies have progressed very little since they were first developed in the aftermath of World War II and are still almost primarily based on metal detection. This makes Colombia’s predicament even more costly and time consuming than usual. Unlike the majority of affected nations, Colombia’s landmines are homemade and typically contain very low metal content.
</p>
<p>
 While domestic and international landmine removal groups go about the painstaking task of ridding the country of those stealthy bombs the old-fashioned way—literally digging up suspected mined areas, inch by inch—Colombian researchers have taken it upon themselves to create cutting-edge technological fixes that they soon hope will expedite the process by an order of magnitude.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="Colombia photos, July 2015.Manual demining, Colombia." class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/desminadoroliverperezenlafincaelparaiso1.width-990_Ab9SNXo.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A member of the HALO Trust, a nonprofit that removes war debris, treads carefully during a defining operation in Colombia.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 “This is no longer basic research, but application,” says Fernando Cristancho, a nuclear physicist at the National University of Colombia. He and his colleagues have developed a specialized robot that uses neutrons to identify mines buried below the soil, while other colleagues are working on devices that weed out the false positives that frequently bog down landmine hunts. Still others have pursued machines that use electromagnetic waves to remotely detonate and destroy landmines from a distance.
</p>
<p>
 “We’re putting all of our energy, effort, students, and time into trying to advance this,” says Felix Vega, an electrical engineer at the National University of Colombia. “We’re trying to to solve our own problems.”
</p>
<h2>
 A Daunting Clean-Up
</h2>
<p>
 The conflict in Colombia began on ideological grounds, with disenfranchised rural citizens calling for a
 <a href="http://www.midlandshistoricalreview.com/the-underlying-dynamics-of-colombias-civil-war/">
  transformation to Marxism-Leninism
 </a>
 . As the fighting dragged on, however, guerrillas began to lose sight of their political agenda and focus more on profit-driven crime, including cocaine production and illegal gold mining. Landmines began appearing in the early 1990s, largely as a way to protect smuggling routes, jungle camps, and illicit crops. Around 11,500 people in Colombia have been injured or killed by those hidden explosive devices since then—though experts believe many more deaths have gone unreported.
</p>
<p>
 Landmines, in general, come in two forms: ones meant to destroy tanks and other vehicles and ones meant to stop humans. Colombia only has the latter: “It’s really difficult to get a car into the middle of a forest,” says Jairo Alexis Rodriguez, a physicist and director of research at the National University of Colombia.
</p>
<p>
 Even more uniquely, all of the mines left in Colombia today are homemade improvised explosive devices (IEDs) rather than commercially-produced military grade ones. Rebels fashioned them with whatever materials they happened to have on hand, including PVC pipes, plastic bottles, and various chemicals. They purposefully left metal out to prevent the military from identifying them with metal detectors, and the variety of substances they used has also made it more difficult to train sniffer dogs to help with cleanup.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/ied-tall.width-990_nVUmd2h.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Many landmines in Colombia are IEDs rather than commercially made and almost entirely devoid of metal, including this one, made from a plastic bottle and plunger.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 That leaves experts with a daunting challenge: how to find mines buried in thick jungles and rugged mountains in a country over twice the size of France with little to no help from traditional demining tools?
</p>
<p>
 Getting a handle on the scope of the problem is a first step, according to Chris Ince, Colombia country program manager at the
 <a href="https://www.halotrust.org/">
  HALO Trust
 </a>
 , a non-profit organization dedicated to cleaning up debris left over from war. “There is an urban myth that the entire country is mined,” he says. “The reality of the situation is that, until a detailed survey is conducted, the true level of contamination remains unknown.”
</p>
<p>
 To do this, Ince and other experts hire community members (and, in some cases, former guerrillas) living near suspected mine fields. With their help, they conduct extensive interviews to determine if landmines are indeed present and, if so, where, exactly, they occur. Because guerrillas wanted local people on their side, they often told rural residents where the mines were so the residents could avoid those areas. After interviewing up to 1,000 people at a given site, Ince and his colleagues use those data to home in on an area of likely contamination.
</p>
<p>
 HALO has cleared more than 500 landmines from over 150 minefields in Colombia. But the task is excruciatingly labor intensive. Some mine fields are a seven-hour walk from the nearest road and require using mule trains to ferry supplies back and forth. Reaching the site is just the beginning. Given that metal detectors have limited use, deminers meticulously dig up the soil of the entire site (sans large shrubs and trees) to a depth of just over a foot. “Up to 70% of our day is spent in vegetation-clearing activities,” Ince says. “You’re literally hand digging the entire area.”
</p>
<p>
 Cristancho adds that, though certain vegetation is left in place, these operations cannot help but cause significant environmental damage. “It looks like a war zone,” he says. “If you take away 15 centimeters of soil all over the place, the earth gets dry and then the area gets washed away in the next rain.”
</p>
<p>
 The method also takes forever. Whereas experts working with a metal detector may cover an area of 24 square yards in a day, in Colombia, they typically cover just one to six square yards. “Having all kinds of procedures in place guarantees high standards of safety but makes the process slow and logical,” Ince says. “One of the biggest things we have to do is keep deminers focused, because it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<h2>
 Modernizing Mine Hunting
</h2>
<p>
 Yet there could be a better way. As Diego Torres, a physicist at the National University of Colombia, asks, “What if we can develop technologies that immediately identify and destroy mines?”
</p>
<p>
 For years, Torres and others at universities throughout Colombia quietly pursued landmine-related technologies in near secret to avoid politicizing their work and raising security concerns. After peace came, “we discovered that groups located just 100 meters from each other had been working in the shadows on the same things for ten years,” Torres says.
</p>
<p>
 For the past decade, Cristancho and his colleagues, for example, have been perfecting a landmine-detecting robot that they believe would spare deminers from having to dig up entire tracts of land. The Alexbot, as they call it, was inspired by existing oil industry technology to measure soil humidity by using neutrons. As Cristancho says, “We didn’t invent this technology, we just put the general pieces together to make it fit a specific task.”
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/img_2081.width-990_g90Ec5k.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Nuclear physicist Fernando Cristancho demonstrates the features of the Alexbot, a robot that he and his colleagues created to detect landmines using neutrons.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 The six-wheeled Alexbot—which bears a slight resemblance to the Mars rover—sweeps a mechanical arm back and forth above the ground as it slowly proceeds forward in an area suspected of having landmines. The arm holds a container with small amounts of californium-252 which emits neutrons used to map things hidden below. The resulting data are based on the rate and speed at which neutrons backscatter when they encounter carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen—all common components of explosives.
</p>
<p>
 In
 <a href="http://unperiodico.unal.edu.co/pages/detail/innovador-prototipo-detecta-minas-antipersona/">
  field tests
 </a>
 earlier this year, the Alexbot successfully detected a deactivated IED—donated to the lab by the Colombian military—that the researchers had buried in diverse soils and at different depths and humidities. In other trials, the team was able to detect buried IED-like objects containing just 3.5 ounces of chemicals typically used in landmines. Next steps, Cristancho says, they’ll perform many more field trials and use machine learning to better teach Alexbot what to look for.
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 Cristancho is not the only researcher working on such problems. His university and Los Andes University has produced around half a dozen PhD students whose work specifically focused on demining techniques. Other scientists are pursuing various solutions as well. The key, Torres says, is to design a suite of technologies that not only expedite the process of finding and deactivating landmines but that also add layers of redundancy. “You can always miss something,” he says. “You need to create more techniques if you want to be sure that you have completely eliminated the threat so people can return to their homeland.”
</p>
<p>
 Vega and his students, for example, are creating another type of landmine detection device that uses ground penetrating radar to map objects buried up to eight inches beneath the soil. They hope this will eventually eliminate the time-consuming problem of false positives, which may constitute up to 99 out of 100 detections using conventional methods.
</p>
<p>
 But such projects are in need of greater support. “These devices are used to avoid people dying and suffering, but that doesn’t bring in much money,” Cristancho says.
</p>
<p>
 In one case, Vega and fellow researcher Francisco Roman had created a patented landmine-destroying device that used directed electromagnetic waves to safely activate mines at just over 80 feet away. It was shelved due to lack of funding. “At the end of the day, we developed a concept that worked, but we had to stop at that stage,” Vega says. “Going to the next phase required more money than was available.”
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/img_2072.width-990_MvauroU.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Fernando Albarracin-Vargas (left), Sergio Gutierrez, Felix Vega, and Diego Alejandro Torres Galindo at the National University of Colombia's landmine detecting test site. Albarracin-Vargas and Gutierrez are using ground penetrating radar to map objects buried below.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 Given such constraints, Ince doubts that the high-tech devices being developed by Colombian scientists will be ready for deployment in the near future. “Probably in the long term some, of the more esoteric technologies being considered will lead to something capable of helping,” he says. “But the chances of taking something from a prototype to a commercially viable and cost-effective technology—one that doesn’t further complicate security requirements within the framework we operate in—is more difficult.”
</p>
<p>
 Cristancho argues that the time scale is not a problem—if only funding were available. With $800,000 and eight months of testing, he believes the Alexbot could be deployable. “We have the right people, and we know what we’re doing,” he says.
</p>
<p>
 Colombia does have an obligation to see that through. The nation is a signatory to
 <a href="http://www.un.org/Depts/mine/UNDocs/ban_trty.htm">
  Mine Ban Treaty
 </a>
 , a United Nations convention that seeks to end the use of antipersonnel landmines worldwide. As part of that treaty, Colombia pledged to become landmine-free by 2021—a goal that HALO and other demining groups are striving to meet. But according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a coalition of non-governmental organizations, Colombia is
 <a href="https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Landmine_Monitor_2017_Embargoed.pdf">
  not on track
 </a>
 for a 2021 victory. Bureaucracy has slowed an already slow process, and certain parts of the country are still under control of organized criminals and the National Liberation Army, another paramilitary group that has yet to agree to peace. Evidence exists that fresh mines are still being planted in those areas, which, for now, remain impossible for humanitarian groups and researchers to reach.
</p>
<p>
 If some of the technologies come to fruition in the next couple years, though, Colombia may have a chance of demining the parts of the country that are at peace by 2021. Nor is Colombia the only nation that could benefit from better landmine detecting and deactivating technologies, Cristancho points out. “Everywhere where you have some kind of political or military conflict, they use landmines, and in the worst case, they use IEDs,” he says.
</p>
<p>
 “Will we get there? I don’t know. But we’re doing everything we can to advance science and technology in this country,” Vega says. “At the same time, we’re producing things that may solve other problems tomorrow.”
</p>
<p>
 Photo credits: Rachel Nuwer, HALO Trust
</p>

<p>Ridding Colombia of landmines may require a multi-pronged mix of traditional and ground-breaking technology.</p>

Who Does Slum Tourism Benefit?

<p>Decrepit neighborhoods have become a magnet for curious visitors, but is the practice as denigrating as some suggest?</p>

Solar Power Could Reinvent the Shipping Industry—If We Let It

<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 During his days in the Royal Australian Navy, Greg Atkinson recalls looking up and seeing plumes of black exhaust, or black carbon, pouring from his ship’s funnel. “I’d just be sitting there—the sun would be shining, the wind blowing—and yet we were burning all this fuel,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘There’s gotta be some way of using these other resources.’”
</p>
<p>
 Decades after that initial observation, Atkinson’s life goal is to make such pollution-belching vessels a thing of the past. At
 <a href="http://www.ecomarinepower.com/">
  Eco Marine Power
 </a>
 , a Japan-based company the electrical engineer founded in 2010, Atkinson is creating rigid solar panel sails for use on large sea-faring vessels. The sails—which are as thin as cardboard and flexible like plastic—will harness the ample wind and solar energy of the open oceans, cutting back on fuel consumption. Ultimately, the technology could lower a vessel’s emissions by up to 10%—or around four tons of fuel saved per day for a large cargo ship.
</p>
<p>
 “It seems crazy to me that we’ve got this massively powerful wind blowing over ships and we’re not doing anything with it,” he says. “Same with solar—it’s crazy.”
</p>
<p>
 Around 100,000 large cargo ships regularly crisscross the world’s oceans, delivering cargo from point A to point B. In doing so, they burn through a staggering amount of fuel—around 250 million tons annually. There are clear real-world repercussions: the industry is the world’s sixth-largest source of man-made greenhouse gas emissions (at 800 million tons annually), and its pollution has been pegged to
 <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es071686z">
  60,000
 </a>
 cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths each year.
</p>
<p>
 But until recently, shipping has largely remained out of sight and out of mind. Lacking any mandatory emissions regulations, company owners had little incentive to clean up their acts. Instead, most choose to power their ships with heavy fuel oil—the “dirtiest fuel imaginable,” Atkinson says, and also the cheapest.
</p>
<p>
 That puts Eco Marine Power ahead of the curve. A committee of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a United Nations agency that regulates shipping, has only just now—as of April 13—adopted
 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/04/13/the-global-shipping-industry-is-finally-going-to-cut-its-climate-change-emissions/?utm_term=.240feb2cf3ad">
  a strategy to lower emissions
 </a>
 from various types of vessels by at least 50 percent by the year 2050 (compared to where they stood in 2008). If shipping is to align itself with the standards of the Paris Agreement, it’ll have to decarbonize—by shifting to biofuels, batteries, or something else entirely.
</p>
<p>
 Something, perhaps, like Eco Marine Power’s innovative solar-wind fix
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<h2>
 The Right Guy For the Job
</h2>
<p>
 Atkinson only became aware of the shipping industry’s pollution problem when he began researching green energy tech for an Australia-based investment firm he founded. As he dug deeper, he realized that he might be poised to help design a partial solution. He had ample experience in marine electrical engineering and automation from his days in the Navy, as well as expertise in telecoms and data management from his career afterwards. Additionally, he was gearing up for a doctorate in maritime engineering, with a focus on computational fluid dynamics. He was exactly the type of person who could fix the problem. The challenge, he realized, was too tantalizing to walk away from.
</p>
<p>
 “I was supposed to be a passive investor, but after finding that nothing was happening in shipping, I veered off course,” he says. “I totally got dragged into this.”
</p>
<p>
 After a difficult first round of fundraising—including capital Atkinson invested from his own company—Eco Marine Power began developing its renewable energy system, which has already been patented in Japan and the U.S. An integrated management and automation program controls the array of EnergySails on the deck, rotating each according to the direction of the Sun and wind. If winds become too intense, sails are automatically lowered, and then raised again when conditions improve. Solar energy collected from the panels is stored in 98% recyclable Furukawa batteries specially designed for cycle use and that can last 15 to 20 years.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 The challenge, Atkinson realized, was too tantalizing to walk away from.
</p>
</div>
<p>
 The system can be outfitted on basically any ship, Atkinson says, from massive freighters to passenger ferries, although it’s better suited for ones that do not travel above 18 knots. But while the company has sold its technologies to several clients, just two ships have signed on: one proof-of-concept vessel in Greece and another in Singapore, Eco Marine Power’s first commercial sale. For now, the Singapore ship’s one-kilowatt solar panel harnesses only enough energy to power lighting—but Atkinson says the product will be built up as the crew becomes more comfortable with it. “The whole system is a tool kit,” he says. “You can go just with solar, or some solar and some sails, or all sails, depending on the ship.”
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/eco-marine_1024x576.width-990_QDx53Uu.png"/>
<figcaption>Marine solar power array being installed on Blue Star Delos in October of 2014 as part of an integrated Aquarius Management &amp; Automation System
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 That Eco Marine Power has just a handful of buyers so far is indicative of the industry’s attitude toward clean energy and reform. “When we spoke to people at shipping companies about using solar and wind, they just thought we were crazy,” Atkinson says. “We’d get comments like, ‘We don’t care about green technology because fuel cost isn’t a concern for us,’ or ‘We don’t have to do anything about this so why should we?’”
</p>
<p>
 In one instance, a company did express interest in the technology early on, and had Atkinson perform an initial inspection of one of its vessels, which it often docked in Southeast Asia. The entire crew would disembark and stay in hotels, save for one man who would remain on board to monitor the ship. For that single man, the company would start the ship’s massive generator—just to power his television, fan and lights. “The biggest energy load was the AC used to keep the generator cool,” Atkinson said. Yet when he presented the company with a solar power solution, they balked. Burning fuel was cheaper for them on the near term, they said.
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<h2>
 An Upwind Battle
</h2>
<p>
 Eco Marine Power’s systems run at around $200,000 for solar panels and $500,000 for solar-paneled sails on a large ship. Companies typically will not see a return on their investment for five to eight years. More than a question of money, though, it’s industry culture—which tends to be highly conservative—that is the primary impediment to change. “In telecoms, you come out with a new product and there will be a queue of people trying to get it,” Atkinson says. “In shipping, it’s the opposite—no one wants to go first.”
</p>
<p>
 Lately, though, this has begun to change. Environmentally-conscious companies that transfer goods by sea are starting to wake up to the realities of the pollution they indirectly cause, and they are pressuring their shipping partners to clean up their acts. “Maybe five years ago there was a bit of window dressing around this issue, but now I think people are taking it seriously,” Atkinson says.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 It’s industry culture—which tends to be highly conservative—that is the primary impediment to change.
</p>
</div>
<p>
 Eco Marine Power is not the only company striving to craft answers to such calls for change. Norsepower, a Finnish company, is developing its own
 <a href="https://www.norsepower.com/rotor-sail-solution">
  bulk carrier sail
 </a>
 , for example, while others are working on smart systems for monitoring ships’ performances and finding ways to save energy.
</p>
<p>
 “Some big players are thinking about these concepts,” says Junji Ohta, director of the East Asia service unit at Wartsila in Finland, one of the world’s largest marine equipment producers. “The industry is starting to look at hybrid solutions and ways to optimize energy sources within the ship itself.”
</p>
<p>
 Pollution-curbing rules like those announced earlier this month represent a major turn for the industry and seem to already be making a difference.
</p>
<p>
 “Regulations are coming into force, and it’s time for people to start adapting to change,” says Captain Mohit Batra, regional director of commercial shipping for Eniram, a clean-tech software engineering company recently acquired by Wartsila. “That’s the bare truth of the industry.”
</p>
<p>
 Ultimately, Atkinson’s goal is to see some form of renewable energy adopted on all ships. “Instead of filling up with oil, we could have ships powered by fuel cells and batteries, topped up with solar and wind,” he says. While a fully green solution is likely decades away, things do seem to be moving in the right direction. As Atkinson says, “I used to have to go out and contact ship owners, but now they are contacting us.”
</p>
<p>
 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/lukeprice88/9504090220/">
  Luke Price / (CC BY 2.0)
 </a>
 , Eco Marine Power
</p>

<p>The shipping industry is the world’s sixth-largest source of greenhouse gas pollution.</p>

Fish Have Feelings, Too

<p>During his first year of graduate school in California, Brad Erisman’s advisor instructed him to watch a group of kelp bass gathered under a dock. Many mundane hours later, he returned and asked Erisman what he had observed. “They’re not doing anything,” he replied. “They’re just sitting there.”</p><p>“It’s not that they’re not doing anything,” his advisor corrected him. “It’s that you’re not cued in on their behaviors.”</p><p>He returned to the dock. Thousands of hours of observation later, Erisman—now a fisheries ecologist at the University of Texas—readily recognizes the errors of his early days. There was a whole underwater world of subtle communication, individual behaviors, and group dynamics taking place right in front of his eyes. He just couldn’t see it at the time.</p>
<div class="related"></div>
<p>Most of us, however, never learn that lesson. As Erisman says, “People just look at fish as something to be put on a plate.”</p><p>In fact, science is increasingly revealing that fishes are intelligent, emotional beings—but the inflated value we tend to assign to all things human often prevents us from accepting such findings, says biologist Jonathan Balcombe, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018291M98/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1"><i>What a Fish Knows</i></a> . Because fishes lack faces like ours, we assume that their mask-like features mean they do not experience feelings. And because fish cannot cry out, we interpret their silence as meaning they do not perceive pain—even as their gasping mouths and flopping fins on a ship’s deck indicate otherwise.</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>Science is increasingly revealing that fishes are intelligent, emotional beings.</p>
</div>
<p>“Their bodies are shaped differently, their eyes don’t blink, they’re bathed permanently in water and—while they make lots of sounds underwater—we don’t hear them because they’re transmitted in an aqueous environment,” Balcombe says. “But they are sentient creatures with the capacity to feel.”</p><p>Humans also tend to assume that because fishes are cold-blooded (put more precisely, ectothermic) and began evolving around 100 million years before land animals, they must be “primitive.” But evolution is anything but static, and fishes’ early start actually means they’re the most highly evolved of all vertebrates, Balcombe points out. Many of the world’s 33,000-plus known species of fish possess incredible senses and abilities, some of which we are only just beginning to understand.</p><p>“People forget that fish were here long before we were, so they’ve had much more time to specialize and to do funky things that we haven’t even wrapped our heads around,” says Marah Hardt, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Sea-Intimate-Connection-Sex-Changing/dp/125011859X"><i>Sex in the Sea</i></a> and research director for Future of Fish, a non-profit dedicated to solving ocean challenges. “When evolution is given time, she really gets creative.”</p><p>Indeed, as scientists like Balcombe and Hardt slowly chip away at the mysteries of lives lived under the sea, it’s becoming more and more obvious that we have grossly underestimated our underwater cousins. “There’s so much we’re still learning,” Hardt says, “and what we’re learning is that they’re far more complex than we previously thought.”</p><h2>Tools, Toots, and Treats</h2><p>People tend to assume that fish are little more than aquatic automatons, when in fact many are highly intelligent. For one, some can use tools—something we once assumed was limited to humans and their closest primate relatives. But tuskfishes and wrasses have <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A9FNua0Q_M">been observed</a> picking up mollusks in their mouths, carrying them over to specially selected rocks and then self-assuredly bashing those morsels open.</p><p>Fish are also quick learners, with strong memories. Despite the enduring “three-second memory” myth, even goldfish—which can live up to 40 years—can recall exact colors and locations of specific feeding tubes up to a year after exposure.</p><p>At some mental tasks, fishes even <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0049068">out-perform primates</a> , including chimpanzees and young children. In 2012, researchers presented two identical helpings of food on a red and blue plate to capuchin monkeys, orangutans, chimpanzees, and cleaner wrasses. The animals could decide which plate to eat from, but after two minutes, the researchers removed the red plate and left the blue one. After 45 trials, all of the cleaner wrasses had learned to eat first from the red plate and then move on to the blue after the red’s removal, maximizing the total amount of food they consumed.</p><p>All of the orangutans and monkeys, on the other hand, failed to figure this trick out, and just two of four chimps cracked the system—but only after 60 and 70 tries, respectively. Balcombe adds that when one of the study authors tried the same experiment at home with his four-year-old using two plates of M&amp;Ms, she failed to catch on even after 100 trials. Such findings, Balcombe says, are “another reminder of how brain size, body size, presence of fur or scales and evolutionary proximity to humans are wobbly criteria for gauging intelligence.”</p><p>But even if we do consider brains the ultimate measure of intelligence, some fishes can measure up. Several hundred species of electric fish in South American and Africa have brains that are almost the size of our own, proportionally speaking. “For fish, their brains are just immense,” says Bernd Kramer, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Regensburg in Germany. “That should signal caution to us humans in issuing our judgement.”</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<p>In the electric fishes’ case, their large brain likely evolved to accommodate all the information they receive through electroreception, or a specialized ability to perceive electric stimuli in the microvolt-per-centimeter range. Electric fishes possess three different types of electroreceptor organs: one for detecting predators or prey by tuning into the natural electric fields that all animals give off in water; another for active electrolocation, allowing them to navigate through dark water as a bat does in the night sky; and a third for communicating with each other.</p><p>The latter receptor is used not only for distinguishing members of their own species from similar ones, but also for identifying themselves and others as individuals. Incredibly, personal identification signals are produced at up to 1,800 pulses per second and differences in signal waveforms can be detected down to one microsecond, Kramer says. Courting males and females synchronize their signals into a type of duet, while competing males take turn issuing their pulses, as though they are arguing. When socializing as a group, individuals will even tweak their frequency by 10–15 Hz from their neighbors, to assure everyone’s electric voice gets heard.</p><p>“They’re using electric signaling in a way that is unimaginable to us,” Kramer says. “It’s quite amazing—and we don’t know how they do it.”</p><p>Until recently, it was near scientific heresy to even speculate as to whether fish have emotions.</p><p>Other species have similarly inventive means to communicate, including by vibrating their swim bladders, grinding their teeth, rubbing their bones together, jiggling their gill covers, and even farting, Balcombe says. Pheromones and visual signals further help fishes convey messages to each other, from signaling danger to broadcasting come-hither invitations for potential mates. All this complex socializing indicates that fish have a sophisticated social lives and depth of feeling—something that evidence has come to support, Balcombe says.</p><p>But until recently, he continues, it was near scientific heresy to even speculate as to whether fish have emotions. Research findings have changed that. We now know that fish, like mammals, seek out pleasurable experiences and avoid painful ones. Captive aquarium fish ride bubble streams for fun, for example, while wild mobula rays throw themselves up to ten feet into the air for no detectable reason other than they seem to enjoy it. Fish also have social lives not dissimilar to our own, with friends, enemies, and “frenemies,” and they do not limit those bonds to members of their own species.</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>For example, cleaner fish, which remove dead skin and parasites from other fish, can recognize up to 100 regular clients of various species. They even can remember when each client had their last appointment (individuals who haven’t visited in a while are prioritized). Clients likewise remember their designated cleaner and may drop by up to 144 times per day—not because they have an exceptional load of parasites to remove, but apparently because they enjoy the caresses of their cleaner’s fins. “They [visit] because they want to,” Balcombe says.</p><p>Fishes even seem aware of us as individuals. Captive fishes have been known to recognize the humans who feed them and ignore those who do not. Balcombe recalls a pinktail triggerfish named Furchbar, for example, who learned to pick up a pebble with his mouth and tap on the glass to get his owner’s attention around feeding time—demonstrating not just interspecies communication but also tool use. Likewise, researchers <a href="http://www.ecvp.uni-bremen.de/~ecvpprog/abstract135.html">studying archerfishes</a> found that, when presented with two human faces, the animals readily learned to identify the person that was paired with a food reward.</p><p>Even wild fish can come to know and recognize humans. Moray eels, groupers, and sharks often form bonds with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr3TCEFPK_Q">regular divers</a> and, like an eager dog or cat, will approach their ungainly land friends for chin scratches and belly rubs.</p><p>Most likely, we will never fully understand fish or know all there is to know about them. As Hardt points out, we’re still discovering new species, let alone coming close to cracking the mysteries of their biology.</p><p>“To fully understand a fish, you would have to be a fish, I think,” Kramer adds. “They’ve kept me busy all my adult life, and the questions never seem to finish—never, ever.”</p><p><i>Read Rachel Nuwer’s commentary piece on this story</i> <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/commentary-relief-from-pain/"><i>here</i></a> <i>.</i></p><p></p>
<p>Photo credit: <a href="https://www.nicepik.com/fish-pira-animal-underwater-blue-ugly-animal-themes-one-animal-sea-animal-wildlife-free-photo-1220626">Public Domain</a></p>

<p>Fish have emotions, social needs, and intelligence. Meet scientists exploring the inner lives of our aquatic friends.</p>

To Communicate With Apes, We Must Do It On Their Terms

<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 On August 24, 1661, Samuel Pepys, an administrator in England’s navy and famous diarist, took a break from work to go see a “
 <a href="https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1661/08/24/">
  strange creature
 </a>
 ” that had just arrived on a ship from West Africa. Most likely, it was a chimpanzee—the first Pepys had ever seen. As he wrote in his diary, the “great baboon” was so human-like that he wondered if it were not the offspring of a man and a “she-baboon.”
</p>
<p>
 “I do believe that it already understands much English,” he continued, “and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.”
</p>
<p>
 Humans and apes share nearly 99% of the same DNA, but language is one thing that seems to irreconcilably differentiate our species. Is that by necessity of nature, though, or simply a question of nurture?
</p>
<p>
 “It could be that there’s something biologically different in our genome, something that’s changed since we split from apes, and that’s language,” says Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “But another possibility is that they might have the cognitive capacity for language, but they’re not able to physically express it like we do.”
</p>
<p>
 In the centuries since Pepys’ speculations, scientists and the public alike have only become more enamored with the idea of breaking through communication barriers separating our species. “It’s every scientist’s dream,” Hobaiter says. “Instead of having to do years of tests, we could just sit down and have a chat.”
</p>
<p>
 Hobaiter’s work shows that chimps have their own rich world of communication—it’s sort of like a secret sign language.
</p>
<p>
 This not only would allow us to find out what our closest relatives are thinking, but also to potentially learn something about our own evolution and what it means to be human, says Jared Taglialatela, an associate professor at Kennesaw State University and the director of research at the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative. “We shared a common ancestor just 5.5 million years ago with both chimpanzees and bonobos,” he says. “That’s useful for making comparisons and answering questions about human origins.”
</p>
<p>
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 Apes and humans are even more similar than we ever imagined.
</p>
</div>
<p>
 Scientists have been trying to teach chimps to speak for decades, with efforts ranging from misguided to tantalizingly promising. Now, however, they are coming to realize that we’ve likely been going about it in the wrong way. Rather than force apes to learn our language, we should be learning theirs.
</p>
<p>
 Researchers have only just begun to understand the rudimentary fundamentals of ape communication, but already the results are exceeding expectations. Apes and humans, they are discovering, are even more similar than we ever imagined.
</p>
<p>
 “Pretty much all of the capacities we thought of as being uniquely human—learning socially, using communication to reach a goal, shifting our communication depending on who we’re communicating with, being able to plan for the future, keeping record of friends and enemies—actually are not,” Hobaiter says. “They’re all present in chimps.”
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<h2>
 All in the Family
</h2>
<p>
 The story of modern research into ape communication begins in 1931, when Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, a husband-wife psychologist team, decided to raise a chimp named Gua alongside their biological son, Donald. The goal was to see if Gua would pick up language, just as a human child would. The landmark experiment inspired many similar efforts—but research with Gua herself lasted less than a year. She was failing to pick up language. (Donald, on the other hand, was reportedly making chimpanzee sounds.) So the Kelloggs called it quits and gave her to a primate center. Less than a year later, she died from pneumonia.
</p>
<p>
 Similar sorts of real-life
 <i>
  Curious George
 </i>
 projects continued in the 1940s and 1950s, when another husband-wife team, Keith and Catherine Hayes, tried to teach a chimp named Viki spoken human language. After several years, Viki could only use four words: mama, papa, cup, and up. The experiment was cut short when Viki died of meningitis at the age of seven, but many interpreted her lack of progress to mean that apes were not capable of sophisticated communication.
</p>
<p>
 Shortly after the Viki experiment ended, however, Jane Goodall’s groundbreaking research on chimpanzees began to hit the news. Goodall showed that chimps are highly intelligent, emotional beings with individual personalities and capable of constructing tools—discoveries that challenged assumptions about their limited abilities.
</p>
<p>
 In 1967—the year before
 <i>
  Planet of the Apes
 </i>
 was released—yet another husband-wife team, Allen and Beatrix Gardner, decided to give communication experiments another try. But they went with a different approach: rather than spoken language, they would teach a chimpanzee named Washoe American sign language. Washoe—who wore clothes, sat at the dinner table, brushed her teeth and played games—quickly began to learn and seemed to understand the meaning of the signs. A few years into the project, the Gardners moved on to other work and gave their adopted chimp daughter to a primate center. But scientists there continued to work with Washoe, and by the end of her life, she had learned around 250 signs and had even taught her son to sign.
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 Sign language, researchers agreed, seemed the way to go. Nim Chimpsky, another chimp raised by a human family in the 1970s and taught to sign, showed similar progress—as did Koko, the gorilla who understood more than 1,000 signs of “Gorilla Sign Language” (GSL) and was exposed to English at an early age. But the work on Nim was cut short when Nim’s adopted father and experimenter, Herbert Terrace, became convinced that Nim had not learned sign language at all, but had rather been imitating the trainers. Terrace abandoned Nim—who continued to try to sign for the rest of his days—to a life of animal testing, cages, and solitude.
</p>
<p>
 Nim’s sad end also cast doubt on whether Washoe had in fact learned to sign. “Debate went back and forth about Nim Chimpsky and others, and the whole field began to implode,” Hobaiter says. “But that also coincided very much with the animal rights movement, and the idea of growing awareness that apes are extraordinary individuals.”
</p>
<p>
 Indeed, some researchers were not ready to give up, and they decided to try yet another approach. In the mid-1970s, Emory University scientists created a symbol board—essentially, a primitive computer—and taught a chimp named Lana to string together different keys to mean different things. Spinning off from there, primatologists discovered what is likely the most talented ape of them all, a bonobo named Kanzi.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/bonobo_2048x1152.width-990_W1BvClq.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha with psychologist and primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 Kanzi, who currently lives at the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative in Iowa, learned to communicate by observing scientists trying to teach his mother. “Kanzi basically surprised everyone when he started using the symbols on the board,” Taglialatela says. “Not only that, he seemed to be showing proficiency for understanding spoken language that researchers were just using around the apes while trying to train them.”
</p>
<p>
 By 1993, Kanzi could pass rigorous language comprehension tests, performing at about the level of a 3.5-year-old human child. In controlled tests, he shows proficiency in about 90 symbols, and his keepers say he can use around 250 symbols in more natural environments. He also seems to understand complex sentences: In
 <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1166068?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">
  one experiment
 </a>
 , he correctly responded to three-quarters of 660 spoken instructions.
</p>
<p>
 Kanzi is no doubt an exceptionally intelligent individual. But researchers continued to wonder whether his knack for communication was a result of his time with humans—or represented a deeper ability, something that scientists, until now, have overlooked. In trying to force apes to learn our language, have may we blinded ourselves to theirs.
</p>
<h2>
 Into the Wild
</h2>
<p>
 Researchers continue to work with captive apes to try to answer questions about how they communicate with one another and how that relates to the complexity of their social and emotional lives. But focus is also increasingly turning to directly observing apes in their natural environment. As Hobaiter says, “If we want to know if humans are unique in our language use, we must look at what apes are doing naturally.”
</p>
<p>
 While some researchers attempt experimental studies in the field, Hobaiter prefers a fly-on-the-wall approach. For the past 11 years, she has stalked her subjects—a group of chimpanzees in Uganda—in the most unobtrusive way possible, allowing them to slowly get used to her. She videotapes their interactions and later analyzes the recordings, noting every gestures the chimps make while also trying to parse the wider social context in which individuals are interacting.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 “If we want to know if humans are unique in our language use, we must look at what apes are doing naturally.”
</p>
</div>
<p>
 Like humans—who regularly communicate with a simultaneous mix of spoken words, tone, facial expressions, and gestures—Hobaiter and other researchers have found that apes seem to use concurrent modalities, or different, overlapping means of getting their point across. It’s a discovery that hints at the complexity of ape communication, but it also makes deciphering seemingly simplistic movements laborious. “If there’s an arm raise gesture, you need to see dozens of cases from dozens of individuals” to fully understand its intent, Hobaiter says. “Like human words with multiple meanings, you need context to know what’s going on in communication.”
</p>
<p>
 So far, she and her colleagues have translated what they believe are the chimps’
 <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10071-011-0409-2">
  basic 60–80 gestures
 </a>
 , plus a number of facial expressions and vocalizations. She believes that, together, these things make up ape language phonics. Distilling the meaning of those various sounds and gestures when put together, however, will be a much more challenging and drawn-out task.
</p>
<p>
 “We have this whole system of communication that looks very language-like,” Hobaiter says. “Definitely, we are only beginning to scratch the surface.”
</p>
<p>
 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chimpanzee_mother_and_child_(14682690082).jpg">
  Magnus Johansson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
 </a>
 ,
 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bonobos_Kanzi_and_Panbanisha_with_Sue_Savage-Rumbaugh.jpg">
  Wcalvin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
 </a>
</p>

<p>Scientists have long tried to teach apes to speak or sign in human language. But what if we studied their language?</p>

Howie Choset's robot snakes are remarkably mobile.

The Evolution of the Bioinspired Robot

<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 If you’re not prepared for the sight of them, Howie Choset’s robot snakes can make you jump. They slither between chairs and tables in his Carnegie Mellon lab, rear their heads to peer into crevices, and inch their way along pipes on the ceiling. When dropped into a pond, they switch over to sea serpent-mode, twisting tightly as they skim through the water. Like an ophidiophobe’s worst nightmare, they will even wrap around your leg and inch their way up toward your groin, if given the chance. “The benefit of the snake is that it’s able to reliably get to locations that people and machines can’t,” Choset says.
</p>
<p>
 These undulating machines may move like living snakes, but they can do things no ordinary serpent can. They can be launched through the air toward a tree or pole and, upon contact, will swiftly wrap around it, unharmed, in a tight coil. Cameras on their heads transmit footage back to their operators. Their length can be quickly changed by adding or removing joints, and those same segments endow them with a greater range of motion than any real-world snake could manage. That’s in part because snakes are burdened with over 100 million years of evolutionary baggage.
</p>
<p>
 But if nature isn’t perfect, neither are robots. Robots may be devoid of pain, endowed with skeletons of steel, easily modified, and adroitly controlled by humans, yet nature, with its versatility and adaptability, continues to outperform the most high-tech bioinspired machines available today.
</p>
<p>
 Nothing makes that point more clearly than Choset’s snakes, which despite their prowess, life-like grace, and extraordinary abilities, were utterly helpless when confronted with an ordinary mound of sand.
</p>
<h2>
 Superlative Start
</h2>
<p>
 If you were to trace the origins of bioinspired robotics, a good place to start would be the office of biologist Robert Full, circa 1986. Then, Full was a new professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and he had a problem. He was hoping to undertake a new study on cockroaches—not the most beloved creature in the animal kingdom—and like so many researchers, he desperately needed funding. Sifting through page after page of rules and funding requirements, he found what seemed like a loophole. If he teamed up with industry researchers, he could get more grant money.
</p>
<p>
 By chance, he soon met robotics pioneers Marc Raibert and Rodney Brooks. (Raibert would later found Boston Dynamics, arguably one of the most advanced robotics company in the world, while Brooks would go on to found iRobot, the company behind Roomba.) After talking, the trio decided to join forces. Full got to work on what he assumed was a flamboyantly embellished grant proposal. “I said, ‘We’re going to be able to create the fastest robots that can climb and go places that no other robots can go,’ ” he recalls. “I felt so guilty, thinking ‘I’m totally making this up!’ ”
</p>
<p>
 They ended up getting the grant.
</p>
<p>
 Full, Raibert, and Brooks’s initial collaboration—which stressed the importance of rudimentary control and mechanics in insect-like legged robots—proved much more than a one-off. “When I look back, I laugh,” Full says. “We wound up doing so much more.” As it turned out, the three were the vanguard of an entirely new field referred to by any number of names—biomutalism, locomotion systems science, computational neuromechanics, or robiophysics. Despite the diversity of monikers, its practitioners all have one thing in common—they team up with other like-minded, but differently trained, scientists to create autonomous and artificial approximations of living systems.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 As biologists have lifted the veil from one biological enigma after another, they have been welcomed into robotics.
</p>
</div>
<p>
 Scientists like Full occupy a unique space in the academic community. They are renaissance researchers whose work falls somewhere within the intersection of biology, physics, mathematics, computer science, engineering, and robotics. Their work is also informed by a sprinkling of materials science, neuroscience, design, and even philosophy. That’s because building a robot requires solving myriad problems. Researchers in different fields bring different perspectives, in part because each is seeking to answer a different question. The discoveries that emerge from these collaborations are more than any single field could ever manage on its own. Ultimately, everyone wins.
</p>
<p>
 As biologists like Full have lifted the veil from one biological enigma after another, they have been welcomed into robotics, a field traditionally stocked with engineers and physicists. Now, it’s practically de rigueur for a new robotics project to look to nature as a muse.
</p>
<p>
 But those researchers aren’t simply trying to build an exact machine replica. Instead, they wrestle with nature, stripping it down to its most functional elements, and then improve upon it. Biomimicry—what some refer to as “nature worship”—is frowned upon by this community. If biomimicry was truly an effective strategy, researchers are fond of saying, planes would look like giant birds with flapping wings and submarines would have flopping fish tails.
</p>
<p>
 “We’re careful not to practice bimimicry since it could lead us to some strange design that’s irrelevant or worse,” says Daniel Koditschek, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s extremely easy to go wrong.”
</p>
<h2>
 Biological Basics
</h2>
<p>
 Few bioinspired robots are as famous as Stickybot. You may not know it by name, but you might recognize the whirring gate it uses to scale vertical glass walls. Stickybot is a robot gecko.
</p>
<p>
 Geckos have dazzled scientists with their ability to scamper up walls, zip across ceilings, and perch on slick window panes. If you manage to catch one of these nimble lizards and take a closer look at its toes, you’ll see a plethora of thin ridges, almost like a tightly packed file drawer. Take an even closer look—at about 700 times magnification—and the ridges blossom into a thick rug of forest-like tubes. Even closer, at about 30,000 times, and you’ll notice that each of these tubes are covered with 100 to 1,000 nanoscale split ends. There are around 2 billion of these microscopic tendrils on every gecko.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/gecko-foot.width-990_yRkSdiD.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Gecko feet are covered with thin ridges, which each contain millions of nanoscale bristles.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 For years, scientists were convinced that these tiny structures were responsible for the gecko’s gravity-defying acrobatics. But they had no idea how, exactly, until Full and his lab solved the biological riddle. They tested hypothesis after hypothesis, from velcro-like behavior to suction and glue. One by one, Full and his colleagues shot them down until they discovered that those hairy tips used the van der Waals force, which is the subtle attraction and repulsion between molecules. Following that breakthrough, mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky and his colleagues at Stanford University created Stickybot. The robot’s footpads sport hairs that are much larger than the gecko’s 200 nanometer threads, but they work using the same principles.
</p>
<p>
 Stickybot took the robotics world by storm, inspiring dozens of other labs to look at everything from kangaroos to cheetahs, moths, cockroaches, crabs, and flies. From those studies, researchers learned the basic principles of movement in the animal kingdom. All legged animals, for example, run by using a spring-loaded inverted pendulum pattern, similar to that of a pogo stick or bouncing ball. And lizard tails and ant feet, they found, both work as tripods to keep their owners stable on walls or in steep tunnels.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 For now, Stickybot largely remains a laboratory curiosity.
</p>
</div>
<p>
 Cutkosky’s robot was a success, but its utility was limited. It proved that researchers could build a robot that could climb like a gecko, but since it lacked a flexible spine, it could only manage to climb flat and gently curved walls. Also, it didn’t work well on rough or dirty surfaces. In other ways, its design hewed perhaps a little too closely to that of its real-world muse—the early generation Stickybot I mimicked the way geckos flex their toes to peel away from the wall, a burdensome feature that researchers have abandoned with Stickybot III.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/stickybot3_h.width-990_SoW3vRQ.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Stickybot can scale slick vertical walls with ease.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 For now, Stickybot largely remains a laboratory curiosity, though researchers are using it to develop the next generation of wall-crawlers. Now that they’ve built an approximation of the real thing, they can tailor the next versions—some of which will not resemble their living lizard inspirations. This next generation will be able to march up walls with loads that are far heavier than any gecko could manage. They’ll also be tailored for specific tasks, from snatching space debris out of orbit to forming landing perches for unmanned aerial vehicles.
</p>
<p>
 “You’re peeling away all the layers of biological details that are not important for locomotion, only getting at the essence,” explains Young-Hui Chang, director of the comparative neuromechanics laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology. “Engineering can surpass biology, but the key is to search wisely, not just imitate for the sake of imitating.”
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<h2>
 Terrain Travails
</h2>
<p>
 Back at Carnegie Mellon, Choset was having no problem sending his snakes slithering—or springing—across a tiled floor. But he knew that if his robot was to succeed in the real world, it would have to contend with all sorts of terrain. For example, a snake robot sent through a collapsed building on a search-and-rescue mission may need to navigate tight pipes, uneven rubble, steep inclines, and even water. Many real-world snakes could do that if they needed to, improvising where they had to, but a robot snake needs its movements to be preprogrammed. “Snakes are really the masters of taking advantage of surface topography,” says David Hu, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “But people still don’t understand why snakes can do all the things they can do.”
</p>
<p>
 To bring his robots up to par with real-world snakes, Choset has distilled snake locomotion into a set of equations. By tinkering with the models’ parameters, he can emulate different snake gaits. Until recently, Choset’s snakes had mastered three of the
 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake#Locomotion">
  four main gaits
 </a>
 that real-world snakes use to slither through the environment. (They could also perform several more gaits that muscle and bone-bound animals cannot.) He has developed various models, including one that went inside a patient’s body to assist in mapping the outside of her heart. Another of Choset’s snake robots specializes in manufacturing and is being commercialized by a major company. Still others have explored archeological sites in Egypt, and he’s putting the final touches on another that can dive 200 feet down in the ocean.
</p>
<p>
 Yet for all of those technological feats, Choset’s prize snake robot, the Modsnake, could not easily scale a sandy slope. That elusive fourth gait—sidewinding—still eluded him.
</p>
<p>
 To crack the puzzle, Choset drew upon a friendly rivalry with Dan Goldman, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Goldman’s diverse background—a childhood spent collecting snakes and lizards, a graduate education in chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, and granular media, and a postdoctoral stint in Full’s lab—provided him with a unique mix of tools. Back when he began working with Full in 2003, Goldman found that researchers knew very little about the way animals move through soil and sand, so he took that on as a speciality. He has since worked with a variety of sand-loving creatures, including sandfish lizards, ants, Zebra-tailed lizards, shovel-nose snakes, baby sea turtles, and solpugids, an order of arachnids.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/sidewinder.width-990_4BslfGn.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Climbing sandy inclines is easy for snakes, but proved difficult for Choset's robot snakes.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 “I realized there’s this entire universe out there that people know very little about, and my interest and skill sets happened to be useful for that,” Goldman says. “Climbing up a sandy hill sounds like a pretty boring task, but once you understand the principles, you can implement it in other ways and into other systems.”
</p>
<p>
 When Goldman heard that Choset’s lab was struggling with subtleties of the sidewinder’s movements, he, Hu, and two of their students decided to take a stab at this latest sand-related problem. “Their snake robot was loosely based on a snake in the sense that it was long and skinny, but that was it,” Goldman says. “Until our study, they had no insight from biology on how to make it better.”
</p>
<p>
 So Goldman and his collaborators approached the problem from a different perspective. They convinced the Atlanta Zoo to build a special facility for housing venomous sidewinder snakes from the Arizona desert, bringing 300 pounds of sand from that same desert along with the animals. Then they pored over hours of footage of snakes crawling up various sandy inclines to determine the kinematics and physics that underlie sand-body interactions.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 “This is an example of robots, biology, and physics coming together.”
</p>
</div>
<p>
 Soon, they picked up on a “cool trick” that sidewinders use to mitigate slips when climbing granular surfaces: they flatten themselves out like an ellipse, increasing their contact with the ground. With the added friction, they can wiggle their way up steep slopes, effectively making the shifty sand behave more like a solid.
</p>
<p>
 Choset seized upon this new data. He altered the parameters in his snake models, tweaking the Modsnake’s gait to approximate the key flattening motion. Rather than directly flattening, the robot simply changes its degree of contact with the sandy surface. “We were able to adjust parameters in our gait model to copy the behavior that Dan observed,” Choset says. “This is an example of robots, biology, and physics coming together to better understand the animal, as well as make the robot work better.”
</p>
<p>
 Without these sorts of interdisciplinary projects, “computer scientists end up with very beautiful factory robots that can move over hard floors, but those that can exist in nature are very limited,” Goldman says. “Studying organisms in their natural environment is a critical feature for creating the next generation of high-performing robots.”
</p>
<h2>
 The Next Generation
</h2>
<p>
 Ten years from now, Choset and several other researchers I spoke with predict a proliferation of bioinspired robots that will do everything from slink through the rubble of collapsed buildings searching for survivors, rove the planet’s deserts collecting data on climate change, buzz over war zones collecting intelligence, and labor in the homes of the elderly who can’t live alone. They might even make it to Mars, where engineers won’t have to worry about their billion-dollar rovers getting stuck in a crater.
</p>
<p>
 As Choset’s growing repertoire of robot snakes demonstrate, some of these creations are coming along quickly. With an additional $5 million investment, he says, he could have a robot ready to inspect nuclear facilities in about two years.
</p>
<p>
 Despite the field’s furious pace, there’s still a long way to go. While robot designers can free themselves from limitations imposed by nature, they must also deal with the shortcomings of machinery. Take sensors, for example. “The difference between real animals and things that seem life-like is that animals can really sense the environment and respond,” Hu says. “The smallest ant may have 1 million times more sensors than the most complicated robot.” Energy, too, is a limitation. Batteries can only hold so much power, but more vexing is that robots tend to move less efficiently compared with animals. “We’re so far behind nature,” Choset says. “It’s humbling and sad, but it’s a good goal for us to strive for.”
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 “This is just about the most exciting field of science there is.”
</p>
</div>
<p>
 As more universities create melting pots of disciplines, additional minds and collaborations will likely accelerate the process of discovery. “I tell my students, this is just about the most exciting field of science there is,” Koditschek says. Many of them are now seeking training in biology, engineering, or physics, fields that were once largely separated from one another. Biologists are now finding jobs in physics departments and vice versa. Some universities are formally blurring the lines, creating interdisciplinary graduate programs that offer biologists the quantitative training they need to understand engineering while giving engineers the foundation in evolutionary science to help them understand why animals look and behave the way they do.
</p>
<p>
 Taken together, they amount to a sea change in the way we envision, develop, and deploy machines. “I think it’s going to be a crazy time in the next 20 to 30 years,” Goldman says. “Once we have better models, then we can really take our gloves off and design.”
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 Photos courtesy Howie Choset,
 <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/furryscalyman/3830578747/">
  furryscalyman/Flickr (CC-BY-SA)
 </a>
 , Stanford University, and
 <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/eiswuerfel/6039349928/">
  eiswuerfel Flickr (CC-BY-NC)
 </a>
</p>

<p>To build a better robot, engineers are turning to an experienced problem solver—nature.</p>

Rachel Nuwer

Articles