Sh!t Sc!ence

Cockroaches are despised by everyone. With the whole human race out to squash them into oblivion, you’d think they’d have died out by now. But instead, they thrive, popping up in the most random places, and miraculously surviving the most vigorous squashing. Scientists have therefore spent months investigating why it is so freaking hard to squish a cockroach.

Scientists from the University of California have collected hundreds of high-resolution, slow-motion videos of them squishing cockroaches. This technology showed that a cockroach can progress at top velocity, a whopping 600mm per second, through a 6mm high crack, and can fit comfortably in a crack as small as 3.2mm high. To confirm that cockroaches are super compressible, the scientists flattened them with a piston applying up to 900 times their own body weight. They showed that not only can the cockroaches sustain that amount of pressure, they can also immediately fly away, unscathed. This shows to everyone that the cockroach is, scientifically, the creepiest animal on Earth (or is that just me?).

But there is more to this research. It subscribes to a line of scientific investigation called terradynamics, where scientists study how animals move in the hope of designing robots capable of negotiating complex terrain, such as muddy, sandy, or rough surfaces. By analysing the movements of cockroaches, the scientists have uncovered a new mode of locomotion on which they modelled a palm-sized, soft-bodied legged robot. This robot can manipulate very rough and constricting environments in a way that no other robot could. The authors of the paper claim that this is the first step towards an effective ‘search-and-rescue’ robot, which could help us rapidly locate survivors in disaster situations.

So next time you question the logic behind a piece of research, next time you look at a Nature article twice, scrunching up your face, next time you roll your eyes to the projects that manage to secure funding despite being based on some seemingly ridiculous premise, think about what we’ve learned from the creepy yet humble cockroach and recognise that perhaps sh!t science is in fact.... The Sh!t.