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  • 2 years ago
Spiders and their webs no doubt send a tingle down many of our spines, but new research has discovered they might also put a jig in your step. Scientists say this could allow them to understand what each vibration means, which might someday allow them to speak spider.
Transcript
00:00 Spiders and their webs no doubt send a tingle down many of our spines,
00:03 but new research has discovered they might also put a jig in your step.
00:07 Everyone knows that spider webs are traps laid by spiders,
00:10 ones that issue an alert via touch when something has been caught.
00:13 Well, now scientists have begun to decode those alerts,
00:16 translating them into music, and they're as haunting as one might expect.
00:28 This is what the researchers say those spider webs sound like,
00:31 an eerie cacophony ripped straight out of a horror movie.
00:34 And different structures of webs created by different species of spiders
00:37 produce their own distinct tunes.
00:39 This work began back in 2021, but the researchers working on the project
00:48 continue to push it further. They have even built a VR spider web environment
00:52 with realistic web physics, letting researchers test what it might be like
00:56 for the spiders themselves, with MIT engineer and researcher on the project
01:00 Marcus Buehler saying about it, quote, "The virtual reality environment is
01:04 really intriguing because your ears are going to pick up structural features
01:07 that you might see but not immediately recognize," adding that they are now
01:11 understanding what each vibration means, something which might someday
01:14 allow them to speak spider.
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