They are very proud of it too.
> While many of the animal programs studied by CIA were never deployed operationally—or failed for a variety of technical, logistical, or behavioral reasons—collectively they demonstrate the incredible innovation and creative thinking that has come to characterize everything that our Directorate of Science and Technology does.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/natural-spies-animals-in-e...
I had no idea about the CIA thing. I just always assumed the "birds aren't real" meme to be a way of showing how ridiculous the police state is going to become in the next decade or so as surveillance gets more and more weaponized against the people it was supposed to protect.
https://interestingengineering.com/military/chinese-special-...
- energy-efficient, long-lasting, mechanically optimized robotic "birds"
- good-enough understanding of the avian brain connectome & operation, such that all you need is a bunch of fine wires stuck in it, and a small CPU sending commands (local and remote operation, etc.)
comparing to wheel size. one can use bigger light wheels. that would make landing on short runways possible. besides, wheeling is much easier than walking. two wheels balancing and rolling around is not a problem today. but.. without legs it's just an common airplane, nothing to talk about. the best of both? put small motorized wheels instead of flat platforms for feet.
BTW, here is how it works from Boston Dynamics, it can jump:
No, this is exactly the opposite. The jumping requires exactly this specific anatomy for so many reasons. It stores energy in the joints, it has a specific balance, the jumping works at multiple angles, etc, etc. You can’t do better than that for this specific purpose.
This is very common. The name used by the locals is called endonym and the one used by foreigners is the exonym.
For example Zhōnghuá is the endonym vs China the exonym. Or Magyarország vs Hungary. Or Deutschland vs Germany. Or so I not just list English exonyms Lake Balaton vs Plattensee.
Also: the noise a drone makes, gives away it's presence.
This pbs aeons video has a great explanation: https://youtu.be/scAp-fncp64?si=hjeWKGBI7riyjE1M
They're mammals, birds have different respiratory system
"Flow-Through Ventilation
Unlike mammals, birds breathe through continuous one-directional flow of air through the respiratory system. We take air in and breathe it out, sort of like the tide moves in and out of a bay. As a result, our breathing system is said to be tidal. Avians have a non-tidal respiratory system, with air flowing more like a running stream."
https://birdfact.com/anatomy-and-physiology/respiratory-syst...
Look at the food source and you'll understand the evolution.
The most caloric dense source of nutrition available in nature? I don't see why that is a limitation to body size for a flying animal - quite the opposite!
bamboo is not calorie dense to humans, because we've lost the ability to digest most of it, but pecans are absolutely more calorie dense than even fatty beef.
all else being equal, an ideal carbohydrate source is more calorically dense than an equivalent ideal lean protein source due to the balance in the thermic effect of food between the two. most mammals outside the obligate carnivores are really well optimized for getting calories from plants— this is why we have amylase in our saliva.
not GP but I think that was the point.
also, volume grows as the cube of linear dimensions which also puts an upper limit on size, as wing surface area only grows as the square (not sure what/how lift grows relative to)
I also don't think it's the warmbloodedness. There are giant mammals in general after all.
Perhaps it is because bats form large, dense colonies? There is only so many resources available in any given ecological niche, so then for any species that fills a niche one would expect those resources to be divided either among many small individuals or a few large ones. Bat evolution chose the "big colony" route, which I assume favors smaller individuals.
With all my respect to you theory I think comparing size of animals should not ignore the medium they moved in: water, land or air. Weight is (loosely but still) related to size. It’s probably not a coincidence the largest mammals lives on water where they need less energy to supper their weight, and it’s not a coïncidents the largest mammals on earth are way bigger that bats.
The biggest bats are ~1.7m which is not so far from biggest albatros (3.7m).
Also consider the biggest bird (Ostriches) can’t fly. Now I’m trying to picture a swimming gigantic bird.
Definitely an interesting idea that should be investigated though! :)
(Also, I've seen so many "AI learns to walk" videos that I'm wondering if it could be used to find a design that would work for this task)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8DJ1a3sLIc
The article itself is worth a read too imo, I found the bits about toes for easier balance and jumping to takeoff energy efficiency interesting.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257410805_Effect_Of...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassault_Rafale#Overview
[3] https://www.alachassebordel.com/post/20-secrets-about-naval-...
A throwaway comment, but huh?
This phrase first puzzled me, but after some googling I found out that in English "raven" is generally used for bigger crows. Until now I had thought that raven was just a more elegant-sounding synonym for crow. TIL...
EDIT: to my surprise, it's the same in my native German: the bigger ones are called "Raben", the smaller ones "Krähen". TIL²...
Tough adding legs instead if wheels might introduce balancng issues, the drone could be lowered further to ground level for the time of harsh weather conditions to increase the traction.
We’ve seen hybrid quadrotor bipeds before, but this one, which is imitating the hopping behavior of Jacana birds, is pretty cute. . . .What’s a Jacana bird, you ask? It’s these things, which surely must have the most extreme foot to body ratio of any bird