And now, a tip of the hat to a nifty solution to the oldest design problem of them all: how do you spread your genes?

I was taking a shortcut through an overgrown field and ended up with a load of seeds stuck to my socks and shoelaces. When I sat down to pluck them out, I found there were two models: the smaller (some 5 mm long) “fuzzy” seeds (right in the photo) actually had many tiny thorns that did the job; but the larger seeds (up to 9 mm in length) were really impressive, each sporting long, needle-sharp spines all over. I wish I had a good stereo microscope to give you better detail, but you can get the idea from the photos below.

So what? So nothing, I guess, except that being an engineer I had to stop and admire the effectiveness of these designs.

And here is another look:

Makes you feel kinda special, to think that these plants would go to all this trouble to evolve seeds that stick like leeches to your socks!

In times of old,  intrepid European explorers who ventured into remote countries like China or Africa would return with travelers’ tales of amazing creatures such as have never been seen. And apparently such wonderful animals still exist in far away lands, reflected in the meager evidence that filters back. Take this sighting…

I saw these small figurines – and dozens like them – on display at a souvenir shop in Ben Gurion International Airport. Nothing surprising about camel figurines in an Israeli tourist trap, after all we do have camels in this country, though you’d need to travel far into the desert to find any. The price tags said these were made in China – no surprise there either, everything is these days.

There were two models: a kneeling animal, with the unmistakable hump, thin legs,and small-eared head of a camel; and a standing one, with the hump of a camel, and the short thick legs, long ears, and stiff mane of a… donkey. Indeed, other than the hump, the Chinese craftsman has done an excellent job of capturing the anatomy of this patient beast of burden. The travelers were right: wondrous chimeric beasts must exist in China, and they seem to inspire Chinese product design!

Here is a skull that used to belong to a smallish plant-eating dinosaur, and as he doesn’t need it any more, it is on display at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin.

When I saw this exhibit, I couldn’t avoid a flash of recognition: this guy looks just like the devil! It isn’t just the horns, or the reddish tint… it’s the whole countenance of the beast, the evil toothy grin, the scaly look, that je ne sais quoi that has become part of the prince of hell’s iconic look in Western culture.

And indeed, the similarity hasn’t been lost on its discoverers who named this beauty Stygimoloch Spinifer - “horned devil from the Styx”.

Here is another view of the same specimen:

One ugly devil of a dinosaur, if you ask me…

The idea of a time traveler messing up the present by changing the past is a Sci-Fi staple, and is used to good advantage in Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story, “A sound of thunder”. Bradbury’s subtlety is sadly lost in the 2005 movie of the same name; here, silly looking monsters run amok in the perturbed present of the movie. If you haven’t watched it, you may wish to save your time for something better.

However, there is one monster that caught my attention. This is a 50-foot eel-like monster that happily chases the humans in the flooded subway tunnels. here are two shots of its head:

These photos don’t do the eel justice -this is one creature you don’t want to be close to – but what struck my associative imagination at once was the certainty that I’ve seen this face before!

You can see where I’d met it  in the image at right. This is a detail from John Tenniel’s illustration of the Jabberwock, the monster in Lewis Carroll’s immortal nonsense poem from the second Alice book, “Through the looking glass”. Here is the very same bulbous head on a long neck, with the four tentacles and the bulging eyes. Only the dentition is different.

So how did the Jabberwock and the Eel come to be so similar? I see two possibilities. Perhaps the movie’s effects people had seen the Tenniel classic and copied it, consciously or otherwise. But if they haven’t, we may have here a strange case of convergent evolution, where two unrelated creatures evolve in parallel under similar constraints and attain the same outcome. What parallel constraints, you ask? Well, in both cases the artists were striving to objectify nonsense. Carroll’s Jabberwock is part of a wonderful nonsense poem; whereas the movie, though far from wonderful, is itself a sorry piece of cinematic nonsense!

We all know about vestigial organs in living creatures, such as the useless vermiform appendix that gives many people a bad time. These were useful in earlier releases of our body plan, but are now just along for the ride.

So here is a sighting of a similarly useless historical remnant in a Bosch power drill.

I refer to the rubber part affixed to the power cord near the drill’s grip. This well-designed part was very handy in the drills of our youth…

The intent was to keep the chuck key from getting lost, of course… you could stick it into the hole and the rubber flaps would keep it in place when it wasn’t being used to tighten the chuck. These keys were all too easy to misplace, so this was an excellent solution – as the vermiform appendix used to be when we were all eating leaves before we became humans and learned about chocolate and other delights.

The thing is, my drill came with the now common keyless chuck… so the key holder is totally unnecessary. At least it isn’t prone to inflammation…

Anyone interested in the Brain – that ultimate piece of high technology – has seen the true but overused statement that each age in history sees the brain as analogous to the latest current technology: the ancients thought of it as a hydraulic system, our grandparents as a telephone exchange, our parents as a computer…

Well, I’ve just run into the next step in this progression. We were watching House on TV, and the irritating genius explained to a colleague that the brain is like the internet, where information packets flow this way and that.

I’m not sure at all that this is a good description – in fact I doubt it very much – but at any rate, we’re one step beyond the brain-as-computer now. Can’t help but wonder what the brain will be likened to next?…

Recently Elite, a major manufacturer of chocolate, candy and coffee in Israel, launched a campaign to prepare us all for “the same beloved familiar taste in a new packaging”. Every instant coffee can had a sticker heralding the change, then the new cans came out with stickers extolling it.

Now actually, the change is minimal and mostly unimportant, as you can see in the photo of the old can (at left) and the new. They have a slightly modified graphic design, but it’s the same good ol’ coffee we’re all addicted to. But there is one change that caught my eye: the new can is noticeably taller. Since both contain 200g of the same powder, you’d think it was also thinner; and in a sense it is, but not at the base; in fact the bottom and top are of identical diameter. The new can, however, has a “waist” in the middle.

So what? So, canned goods have to be stored, transported, and stocked. They therefore need to be packed close together; ideally you’d want them hexagonal, as the bees had discovered long ago. But even with round cans, you need to try and minimize wasted space. In the home this means minimizing shelf footprint, or base area; you want to be able to put as many of these on a shelf as possible. For shipping and storehouse space you also care about height, of course. But what you really don’t want is to have this sexy curvaceous can that maintains the same footprint but adds height by wasting unusable empty space in the middle.

Oh well, at least they have a new font in their logo.

Honeycomb photo source: Richard Bartz, via Wikimedia commons.

There are many solutions that claim to repel flying insects; some even work.

For instance, there are chemicals – stuff you put on your skin, stuff you burn like incense – at least this makes sense: we can see how some smelly material may offend the insect’s finer sensibilities. Then there are hi-tech solutions, like the electronic gadgets that supposedly emit a hypersonic sound that mosquitoes can’t stand. We once tried this out – my son sneaked up on a mosquito standing on a wall and turned the gizmo on right next to the critter’s ear (or whatever they have). The insect didn’t even deign to move an antenna; maybe it was deaf (or maybe we were sold the electronic equivalent of snake oil).

But the most amazing device is one I snapped in a restaurant today: a nylon bag filled with water, hanging from the rafters (I’ve also seen them hanging from tree branches occasionally). And this traditional system is in use not only in Israel – as I discovered in Google, the same method is used in the US, Mexico and elsewhere: so it’s really globally known.

I asked the waiter why a water bag will drive flies away, and he said with great certainty that the fly sees its own enlarged reflection in the water and it scares it away. I heard this explanation before; presumably the fly thinks it just met a bigger, meaner fly, and decides that retreat would be prudent.

I have no idea whether anyone confirmed this theory (any input on this is welcome), but whether the explanation is correct or not, you have to admit this is one solution that is perfectly acceptable from all angles: environmentally friendly, harmless to humans, humane even to the flies, and as cheap as it gets.

Speciation, in evolutionary biology, is the splitting of a species into two different sub-species that cannot interbreed; it is one of the engines powering evolution. One mechanism responsible for this is the appearance of a physical barrier that cuts part of the species off from the rest, as when tectonic activity creates an insurmountable rift or mountain range, or an island breaks off from the mainland. The creatures on either side of the barrier evolve independently, resulting in such wonders as the dwarf elephants that used to exist on mediterranean islands, or the diverse finch species of the Galapagos.

During my recent visit to Berlin I was amused to see the same phenomenon, of sorts, happen to man-made objects – namely, pedestrian traffic lights.

Pedestrian crossing Walk/Don’t walk signals vary between countries, but in each country they usually have one standard design. In Europe they usually follow the European standard of a red standing man and a green walking man.
Now this is also the case in Berlin, except that there they have two designs. In West Berlin, the little men are skinny and utilitarian; but in East Berlin they are stylized, chubby and humorous: the famous Ampelmännchen.

The Ampelmann design was developed in the GDR in 1961, and was used in East Germany while the barrier of the Iron Curtain prevented design standardization with the West. When the Berlin Wall became history, the citizens of that fascinating city had two different signal types; for a while you could tell which part of town you’re in by observing the one in use.

And when a barrier comes down and the two species mix again, it is possible for one to wipe out the other. In Berlin, there were plans to replace the Ampelmann with the EU standard of the skinny, businesslike version. Fortunately this planned extinction of the eastern variety met with a public outcry, and now the funny man in the hat is a protected species; in fact I heard they plan to replace the western version with Ampelmännchen, since they’ve become a kind of city mascot. In one pedestrian crossing I even saw the two little men – East and West – eyeing each other uneasily across the street…

The wonders of the natural world are many, and the living body includes countless amazing features (and, admittedly, some not-so-amazing ones as well). Today I give due homage to a piece of truly elegant design: the perfect match of the outer ear to the iPod’s earphones!

The earphones’ convenient usage stems from the presence of those details of ear anatomy that form a perfect keyhole structure to hold the earbud in place just against the opening of the ear canal. The structure echoes (after a 180 degree turn) that seen on the backs of many wall-mounted household objects, like the fan seen in the photo below.

In case you wondered, the small folds in the outer ear’s convolutions that make this possible are called the Tragus and Anti-Tragus, as seen in this detailed illustration from Gray’s Anatomy. They hold the earphone’s round body in a snug fit against the suitably sized Concha.

We humans may not have the most impressive ears (just ask a bat, or a rabbit, or an elephant) but we certainly come pre-customized to hear our favorite music on the go!