{"id":31974,"date":"2011-02-27T16:43:28","date_gmt":"2011-02-27T16:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/how-sandfish-lizards-slither-so-quickly-through-the-sahara-80beats\/"},"modified":"2011-02-27T16:43:28","modified_gmt":"2011-02-27T16:43:28","slug":"how-sandfish-lizards-slither-so-quickly-through-the-sahara-80beats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/how-sandfish-lizards-slither-so-quickly-through-the-sahara-80beats.php","title":{"rendered":"How Sandfish Lizards Slither So Quickly Through the Sahara | 80beats"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sandfish lizards jostle back and forth, bending their bodies into a slithery S-curve to swim through the sands of the <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/80beats\/tag\/sahara\/\">Sahara<\/a>. Like scorpions and several other native desert species, they long ago mastered the difficult art of moving through the myriad grains of a sandy expanse to escape predators or the blistering African sun. And now physicists are close to cracking their secrets.<\/p><p>Daniel Goldman&rsquo;s team has been trying to figure out just how the sandfish lizards do it for years now; in 2009 they built a robot to simulate the creature&rsquo;s slithering motion. This time, for a study in the <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org\/\">Journal of the Royal Society Interface<\/a>, the scientists tried to model the physics of an animal knocking around so many grains of sand and see how the lizards burrow with such efficiency.<\/p><p>The team found <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sine_wave\">sine-wave<\/a>-like movement allows the lizard, and their robot, to push forward in sand, but creating computer models for the experiments proved problematic. Simulating all of the tiny sand grains required a lot of money to purchase time on powerful computers. So, the team performed the same experiments using 3-millimeter-wide glass beads instead of sand. &ldquo;We wanted something ...<\/p><p><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/nrvjIOlO7OE8VU5AH1e-VOeJ6Is\/0\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/b0fa7_di\" border=\"0\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/a><br><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/nrvjIOlO7OE8VU5AH1e-VOeJ6Is\/1\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/b0fa7_di\" border=\"0\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/a><\/p><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/b0fa7_bP4tQFORUMw\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/b0fa7_DZRgo8xbppM\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sandfish lizards jostle back and forth, bending their bodies into a slithery S-curve to swim through the sands of the Sahara. Like scorpions and several other native desert species, they long ago mastered the difficult art of moving through the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/how-sandfish-lizards-slither-so-quickly-through-the-sahara-80beats.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31974"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}