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Journalism of Courage
Some people are afraid of spiders and the way they crawl. Then, imagine dead spiders picking up objects. Yes, researchers from Rice University, Texas, have reanimated dead spiders and left netizens horrified with the “creepy” update.
A video shared by Now This shows a dead spider attached to a syringe lowering and picking up another dead spider. The acts in the video do not end there. The dead spiders thus reanimated as mechanical “claws” pick up other small objects also, terrifying internet users.
Watch the video here:
“Absolutely nothing good can come from this. This is how we get eldritch horrors unleashed, mark my words,” a commenter tweeted, referencing a board game that has players exploring horror-filled locales from a fictional universe.
Another user wrote, “I sure would like to send cadaver sniffing dogs to the homes of these researchers.”
https://twitter.com/dohlmania/status/1586110213580820480
As per The Verge tech news website, scientists call this new area of research “necrobotics”, said to be a cheap, effective and biodegradable alternative to current robotic systems.
Daniel Preston, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the American university, explained the concept in the video. “It wasn’t something that we planned on, coming in and setting up the lab to find one of these spiders kind of in the hallway, see it all curled up, and wonder why that happened. One thing, I guess, led to another and we ended up using these as grippers for those sort of small-scale applications. But when you think about spiders, they have flexor muscles that will bring their joints and appendages in towards the body, but they don’t have extensors,” he said.
“And instead, they do that with hydraulic pressure that they generate inside of the main cavity or chamber of their body. And so because of that, when they die, that’s why you see spiders curled up. But at the same time, that means that we can use hydraulic pressure when we use the spider as the material for our gripper to take advantage of that and extend all of its legs or joints,” he added.
