Posted : April 2014
Author : Hassan Aftab
 |
| Courtesy: Jiangshui Huang |
Accidental inventions and discoveries are not uncommon; we
have had a fair share of those in the past. A team of researchers at Harvard
seems to have stumbled upon one such prodigy. This one involves crossing rubber
band with an octopus. The team of researchers was attempting to create springs.
A couple of strips each bearing equal length were glued together and stretched
before each end was clipped with slim strings such that they could freely
rotate around. The strips took an entirely new shape as the force stretching
the strips died out.
This whole new shape looks very much like a double helix
that bears various perversions. One could argue that it is more along the lines
of being hemihelix since the helix changes course from rotating clockwise to
rotating anti-clockwise. In case you were left wondering, that variation in
direction of the helix is what a perversion is. Researchers did not expect the
bands to undergo more than one perversion but eleven perversions were noticed.
The team of researchers was able to show that the perversions rely on the ratio
of height to width of the cross section of each strip. Wider strips had no
perversions whatsoever. On the contrary, ones with small heights had plenty.
An author of the study, Associate Professor Katia Bertoldi
said, “Once you are able to fabricate these complex shapes and control them,
the next step will be to see if they have unusual properties; for example, to
look at their effect on the propagation of light.”
The lead author, Jia Liu was pleased by the prospects of the
study: “We see deterministic growth from a two-dimensional state - two strips
bonded together - to a three-dimensional state. The actual number of perversions,
the diameter, everything else about it is entirely prescribed. There is no
randomness; it’s fully deterministic. So if you make one hundred of these,
they’ll always perform exactly the same way.”
What about that octopus, you must be wondering. That was the
original experiment; making new springs courtesy of cephalopods which is a type
of molluscs including octopus.
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