| Lamplighter |
04-05-2013 05:32 PM |
A few nights ago, I watched a tv program about the vision of predators and their prey.
It seems that starting with some sort of fleshy, water-living worm eons ago,
a light-sensitive tissue evolved into the skull- and eye- stucture that
is common to all predators from the time of dinosaurs to today.
That is, prey animals have eyes yielding wide fields of vision with little or no overlap.
But predators have two forward-looking eyes with overlapping fields of acute vision for depth perception.
They used a cartoon video to describe the evolution of the retina, the lens, and the tapetal membrane of wolves and lions.
Then this video showed up today in the Google News...
Quote:
A new tissue-like material with the squishy stiffness of fat or brain cells
can be programmed to undergo delicate shape changes, akin to the unfurling of a flower’s petals.
Built with a custom-made 3-D printer by scientists at the University of Oxford in England,
the “droplet network” comprises tens of thousands of tiny water droplets connected by lipid layers.
<snip>
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