Metal Nickel Behaving Like Snake

Metal Nickel behaving like snake

blog.wired.com

ARGONNE, Illinois — In the basement of a nondescript building here at Argonne National Laboratory, nickel particles in a beaker are building themselves into magnetic snakes that may one day give clues about how life originally organized itself.

These chains of metal particles look so much like real, living animals, it is hard not to think of them as alive. (See exclusive video below.) But they are actually bits of metal that came together under the influence of a specially tuned magnetic field.

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[edit on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:27:18 -0500 by MemoryShock]

Looking at how their particles self-organize, the scientists see echoes of herds of sheep and schools of fish. It seems that there might be some common rules that underpin the behavior and movement of groups of things, but it's not clear what those rules are. It took a couple of years of exhaustive research to figure out how the systems emerge, some of which will be published next week in Physical Review Letters.

Perhaps, by studying this simple system, they can understand what Aronson calls "the fundamentals of self assembly, how nature can organize itself into ordered states." The idea is that if they can determine how magnetic fields and water tension can excite these particles into complex emergent behavior, they will get closer to understanding more complicated, messier systems — like the primordial soup from which life arose on Earth.

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[edit on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:16:35 -0500 by MemoryShock]

Absolutely amazing for sure. Star from Me.

Very cool.

There have been a few proposed theories about how natural non-living structures might have carried organic molecules around in an orderly pattern, resulting (after enough time) in self-replecating assemblies of organic molecules, followed thereafter by true "life" itself. Among the more common forms of inorganic yet regular and repeating natural structures are crystals. In the early primordial earth, mud and clay crystal formation would have been quite common. If this indeed was part of the process of the origin of life, the old biblical assertion that God created man "out of clay" might not be that far from the literal truth...

Yep... Emergence is an amazing field to study.


Cymatics also shows varying degrees of life-like patterns, although simply held in place by sound.



I completely recommend the books Emergence:The Secret lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, as well as The Emergence of Everything...

reply to post by cowboy18o


Fantastic.

Reminds me of those A.I insects . Core wars, 80`s?

Hi guys!

I found this research fascinating, and I was able to replicate this on my kitchen counter. I've posted directions so you can fiddle around with it yourself:

sites.google.com... c-snakes

Cheers!
Craig

Sorry, the link I posted above is broken. I'll just do it as text:

sites.google.com...

Cheers!
Craig