This paper presents a novel design of a Jiegged “spider” robot capable of moving in a wide range of two-dimensional tunnels. The spider moves in a quasistatic manner, by stably bracing itself against the tunnel walls and moving a free limb to a new position. The design has been strongly influenced by the recent immobilization theory of Rimon and Burdick [13, 15]. The theory dictates the minimum...

The development of a spider silk-manufacturing process is of great interest. However, there are serious problems with natural manufacturing through spider farming, and standard recombinant protein production platforms have provided limited progress due to their inability to assemble spider silk proteins into fibers. Thus, we used piggyBac vectors to create transgenic silkworms encoding chimeric...

Noninvasive genetic sampling enables biomonitoring without the need to directly observe or disturb target organisms. This paper describes a novel and promising source of noninvasive spider and insect DNA from spider webs. Using black widow spiders (Latrodectus spp.) fed with house crickets (Acheta domesticus), we successfully extracted, amplified, and sequenced mitochondrial DNA from spider web...

Autonomic nervous system arousal should theoretically increase during a phobic reaction. Eleven spider phobics and 11 nonspider phobics viewed spider, seascape, and surgical slides while several physiological responses were continuously recorded. Results indicated that spider phobics showed significantly faster heart rate, greater heart rate variability, and vasoconstriction during spider slide...

Competitive Intelligence (CI) aims to monitor a firm’s external environment for information relevant to its decision-making process. As an excellent information source, the Internet provides significant opportunities for CI professionals as well as the problem of information overload. Internet search engines have been widely used to facilitate information search on the Internet. However, many p...

It is well known that age influences organism mobility. This was demonstrated in vertebrates (such as mammals and birds) but has been less studied in invertebrates with the exception of Drosophila and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Here we studied the influence of age on the mobility of the orb-weaving spider Zygiella x-notata during web construction. The orb-web is a good model because i...

The Spider Woman or Grandmother Spider legends are part of the creation mythology for several southwestern American Indian tribes, including the Hopi, Pueblo, and Navajo. One story says that in the beginning of time only two beings existed: Tawa, the Sun God, with the powers of all that is above; and Spider Woman, the Earth Goddess, with the powers of all that is below. The Sun God imagined the...

spiders are poorly studied in iran, based on the latest studies the spider fauna of iran includes 394 species in 126 genera belonging to 36 families. considering the climatic and geographical variation of iran, it can be assumed that iran has a rich spider fauna compared to the adjacent countries. the present study seeks to take a new step in the ongoing active research of iranian spider fauna....

We show how a d-stress on a piecewise-linear realization of an oriented (non-simplicial, in general) d-manifold in Rd naturally induces stresses of lower dimensions on this manifold, and discuss implications of this construction to the analysis of self-stresses in spatial frameworks. The mappings we construct are not linear, but polynomial. In the 1860–70s J. C. Maxwell described an interesting...

The idea of applying map and filter functions on consecutive sublists instead of on individual list elements is discussed and developed in this paper. A non-empty, consecutive sublist is called a bite. Both map and filter functions accept a function parameter a bite function which is responsible for returning a prefix bite of a list. We develop families of bite functions via a collection of hig...