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We used to consider the fastest creature on earth a cheetah, capable of accelerating to 100 kilometers per hour in three seconds. But, as scientists prove, there are much faster living creatures, for example, birds, insects. True, the speed of many of they are not straightforward, but rather relative.
Suffice it to say that the tick of the species Paratarsotomus macrop can a second to cover a distance exceeding 300 of its own dimensions. The same cheetah with such opportunities should have developed speed of more than 3000 kilometers per hour.
A photo from open sources
But which creature is still the fastest from a scientific point of view? We will not name the previous record holders, since recently American scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology found a new winner in setting the speed of movement, and it turned out to be … a worm.
This is a unicellular freshwater creature called Spirostomum. ambiguum, has a length of only 4 millimeters. However, this baby capable of accelerating up to 200 meters per second and developing speed almost 750 kilometers per hour. This fantastic moves worm with cilia, but mainly due to contraction of your body. Imagine that he is capable of in a matter of milliseconds, shrink to 60 percent, and then, straightening up with the same incredible speed, demonstrate the most tremendous speed of movement of a living creature on Earth.
A photo from open sources
Scientists cannot yet understand not only the mechanism itself contraction-displacement, but also how Spirostomum ambiguum at the same time manages to keep their entrails safe and sound – fiction and more!
Currently a group of specialists studying Spirostomum ambiguum received a four-year grant from the National Science US Fund in order to find out all these puzzles. So generous financial influence is not accidental: the data obtained can serve a good basis for creating robots fundamentally different from modern designs, that is, the “smart technology” of the new generation, which, as the assistant professor Saad Bhamla said, will be able to effectively use the “molecular springs”.
