A team of engineers have set a small robot climbing walls in order to compare how natural and artificial snail slimes work. A snail's slime acts as both a glue and a lubricant, allowing the snail to crawl up walls and across ceilings without falling off. The snail pushes until the structure of the glue breaks, at which point it glides forward. When the snail stops, the glue structure reforms - sticking the snail safely to the ceiling. The team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, and the Catholic University of Leuven (CUL), Belgium, looked at how the cycle of glue breakdown and repair works in natural snail slime.
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]