Did you know there's an insect that can fling its pee 40 times faster than a cheetah accelerates? We did — thanks to a comic from the Bhamla Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 2020, principal investigator Saad Bhamla has been leading the charge to make science more accessible by publishing comics alongside every paper his lab publishes. Today, he introduces Emily to two of the most popular characters — Sheriff Sharpshooter and Captain Cicada — and shares why a comic about butt-flicking insects is a valuable way to take science beyond the lab. Want to hear more about nature's superpowers? Send us an email at [email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Saad Bhamla and what does his lab study?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Saad Bamla is a scientist and a tinkerer. At his lab at Georgia Tech, he leads a group studying the physics of life.
I'm very promiscuous in my organisms, so nothing is off the table.
The Bamla lab studies the biomechanics, so the movement of different organisms. Springtails, flamingos, worms, cicadas. A few years ago, Saad decided to turn one of his lab's research papers into a comic book.
Chapter 2: What is the slingshot spider and how does it catch prey?
The Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms, The Slingshot Spider.
This comic is set deep in the Amazon rainforest, and it's all about the slingshot spider. This spider has an amazing adaptation to turn its web into a high-speed trap to catch prey.
First, the spider grips the silk line of its web with its pedipalps and front legs. a portion of the web is bundled into a tight coil. A coil so tight, the web takes the shape of a cone. And when the spider senses a hapless flying insect, it releases the line with its front legs and flings itself and the web backwards to snack its prey.
Those are the flies saying, It's the slingshot spider as it flies through the air like a daredevil.
And the illustrator, Lindsay Lee, drew it like a circus performer. So the spider is being launched out of a cannon with a cape and a crash helmet.
In fact, it has the fastest full-body motion of any arachnid. What a daredevil.
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Chapter 3: Why did Saad Bhamla create comic books for his research papers?
Whee! Saad read me the whole comic. It was awesome. It's based on actual research, a paper published in the journal Current Biology in 2020 that was led by Simone Alexander. For a lot of scientists, after publishing, they just call it a day. But back in 2020, when Saad went to check if anyone had actually read the paper...
I think it was abysmal. I think we got a few clicks on it.
The people reading and clicking were other scientists.
And it kind of dawned on me that, forget other adults, no kid ever would go to currentbiology.org and actually download this and read this. And so there was this lingering feeling that there has to be a better way to share this beautiful discovery.
So Saad decided that from that point on, for every research paper the lab published, they would also invest in creating a comic book. Today on the show, we jump into a biophysics comic book to learn how animals eject fluids and why a comic about butt-flicking insects is a valuable way to take science beyond the lab. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Chapter 4: What is the comic series 'The Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms' about?
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Chapter 5: Who is the Glassy Wing Sharpshooter and why is it called a 'butt flicker'?
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Okay, so Saad, your comic series has a name. It's called The Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms. Yes. Yeah, and your main illustrators are Lindsay Lee and Jordan Culver, so shout out to them. We're going to walk through a couple of the comics, starting with the one called Behold the Bug that Super Propels P. And this comic is all about a bug called the Glassy Wing Sharpshooter.
Who is this character?
It's a tiny bug. They drink juices from plants, like their xylem fluid, and then they leave behind a gift, which is a bacteria called Xylella fastidiosa, which creates a lot of problems across the United States, from California for vines and then citrus from Florida. But it's a beautiful bug, and it drinks a lot, and it pees a lot.
So the co-creators of this comic, Jordan Culver and Rick Wirth, depict this sharpshooter as an outlaw in a cowboy hat with a catapult on its butt to fling away a bead of pee. And this is known as a butt flicker. How did you figure out how the butt flicker works? And how do you even measure the speed at which this glassy winged sharpshooter ejects its pee into the world?
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Chapter 6: How does the Glassy Wing Sharpshooter eject its pee at incredible speeds?
I was actually at my son's pre-K who's five-year-old and showing this and he loves it and all the kids love it because they've never seen pee. Like to me, this is the most beautiful pee in the world. It's like a perfect drop. So we used macro lenses that allow us to zoom in, effectively a microscope, but with a high-speed camera.
And that's where we kind of focus in on the business end of this bug, which is the butt flicker like you shared. And yeah, it was so amazing for the first time to see how it flicks these droplets at such high speeds. It's just incredible.
Chapter 7: What scientific techniques were used to study the sharpshooter's pee ejection?
It ejects them, you write in the comic, 40 times faster than a cheetah accelerates. And the droplet moves faster than the butt flicker. And you compare it to like as if a baseball were to move faster than the arm of the baseball pitcher. Yeah. How is that even possible? How can the droplet like pick up speed in the air?
This was the whole conundrum. And my graduate student, Elio Chalita, who did this work, and he showed me this. I didn't believe it. And we checked again and again. And the kind of aha moment, which is these droplets are compressible. They deform and squishy because of surface tension. So they store energy by squishing it, just like if you had a Jell-O.
Or like a water balloon.
Exactly, like a water balloon. So it can store energy by surface tension. And that was why we called it super propulsion, because it gets some energy for free by storing energy in the deformation or the squishiness of the drop.
Chapter 8: How do droplets gain speed after being ejected by the sharpshooter?
And because they're so small, surface tension, you're saying, would keep the drop stuck to them. So it'd be like if our pee just like wouldn't come off of us. So they also need the flicker to just be like, get away.
Precisely. It sticks to them. And so they have to give this flick.
Yeah, and what's cool is in the comic you say that studying super propulsion like this could help us humans design devices to fling away liquid too.
A neat example of this is in your smart watches or hearing aids. Smart watches, for example, have a button where after you go for a swim, you can press a button and it ejects the water to protect the electronics. We think we can learn a trick or two from the sharpshooter and improve the ability of these low-power electronics to eject water from tiny crevices and areas using very minimal energy.
And our friend, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, makes a return in the comic Captain Cicada and the Justice League. which is based on two papers about fluid ejection and nature. And I want to focus on the part in the comic that's a confrontation between our guy, the sharpshooter, and the much bigger cicada.
Yeah.
Howdy, cousin. Word is that you're hogging all the xylem around these parts.
Oh no, you already had your comic. It's my turn, Sheriff Shop Shooter.
I think we need to settle this with a good old-fashioned shootout.
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