Physical Entomology: Insects Through the Lens of Mechanics - Manu Prakash - TEDxGotham

Manu Prakash, of Harvard University, brings to light the bio-mechanical wonders within insects.

And today I'm going to tell you about

a very exotic creature out there
in my collection.

It's a commom house fly.

So, everybody's seen
a common house fly?

Yeah? You guys have
a fair share of bugs here, so...

(Laughter)

Before I start, you're going to get
very up close to these things.

You've never probably been
so close to these creatures.

So, I just want to know,

who really is freaked out with insects?
Please be very honest.

I'm not going to get offended.

Who really gets freaked out

or thinks they're weird and
would much rather squat them?

Which is perfectly honest.

Most commonly,
that's the behavior we see.

Ok, so we have a few people
but you guys are more brave.

So that's a good start.

Ok. So, once there was a party.

There is a party on this planet going on.

I got an invitation to this party

a hundred and fifty million years late.

As humans.
What party am I talking about?

Is this a Halloween party? There are
all these bugs with different costumes...

These are pictures from the marine census
that just came out of new species

that were found very recently
in the ocean.

I can keep going

and it'll take me hours and hours

to just show you just stuff
that we discovered last year.

The party I'm talking about
is the party of biodiversity.

There is all this stuff out there,

not just us, and we are only
a part of this party.

I was told to bring a prop.

And my most favorite prop, believe me,
is pond scum.

So, I was going to bring
a bucket of pond scum

and ask you guys a very simple thing:

how many creatures, do you guys think,
are out there,

if you go out to a lake,
fetch a bucket of water,

how many have you caught?
Anybody has a guess?

(Audience) 300? 5 million?

Millions of thousands and...

The answer is, we don't know!

You could go out there
and find something

that nobody on this entire planet
has seen before.

And this doesn't mean you have to go
to Antarctica or these exotic places,

you can go in your own backyard.
In a drop of water.

This is a beautiful book that talks about
all these tiny little things...

These are single cell plants.
These are diatoms.

They are all very different
and do amazing things

that no scientist or any engineer
could ever actually achieve as yet.

Now is the bad part.
I prepped you up.

I have a feeling that there is
something bad coming.

The party is going to be over very soon.

And this is why the party
is going to be over very soon.

I'm not going to harp on this
of the bad things we're doing,

but, just believe me -- or most of you
that have already read --

that things are looking really,
really bad.

We're losing things faster than
we can actually discover them.

So you might ask,
what's the big deal?

The point is, to be able
to connect to these things,

to things that you're actually losing,
I think the big connection is knowledge.

Just knowing something is out there
is not good enough.

It's just another name in another phylum,

in another class, another species.
Who cares?

The point is, once you have knowledge,

once you actually understand
how this life works

you get to connect to it and
appreciate it in a completly different way.

This is what we are lacking
in the debate of biodiversity.

So, the question today was,
as the parties collaborate, what can you do?

And I'm going to argue, you can
go out there and discover stuff.

Discover facts, discover things
that no other mankind knows.

So, there are people in the past

-- and a lot of famous business leaders
have done this before --

they discovered coffee.

This is a legal drug --
talking about drugs on the stage --

that all of us actually drink everyday.

But it was just found as
a random plant in the rainforest

and the market grew from there on.

A lot of people talk about that
to have a sustainable biodiversity,

we're going to find all the solutions
to human problems in many of these things.

There are beetles out there that
at this very moment are chewing up

antivirals that we have no idea about.

There is a glue that a mussel makes
that you can actually use under water.

Rather than stitching your own stitches
when you get hurt, you put the glue on,

and your body's tissue
actually merges together.

So there are these fascinating things
that we, as humans,

have no idea to imagine right now.

So, it's not about applying,
going from a problem to a solution.

It's going and finding out
what's happening out there.

So, rather than the role
of business leaders,

I want you to be citizen scientists,

take out your little lense
and go figure stuff out.

And I'm going to tell you
only one story

of all kind of things that we have found
completely at random.

We had no plans.

Ok. So, there is science in the middle.

So, why insects?
I'm fascinated by them.

They are kind of weird.
They do very bizarre things.

This is a water strider we discovered
that actually walks on water.

When you poke at it, it has
a capability to gallop,

just like the gallop of a horse

but completely on a water surface.

They are beautiful too.

Not only from the outside,
the parts that you see.

But as an engineer,
they are beautiful from the inside.

The way they actually work,

the way they perform the things
that they actually perform.

And, in my opinion,
the coolest reason to study insects:

they are the aliens of this planet.

There is a beautiful documentary
that came out on "Aliens of the Amazon".

The bizarre ideas that they have

are really outstanding,
and I think it would be a shame

if we really actually didn't look at them
very closely and try to figure out

what is going on?

Where are we missing
all these ideas?

Ok. So, here is a confession:
they also do bad things.

So, a common example are

all these diseases that flies
actually spread,

and a very common one is
the African sleeping sickness.

This is the tsetse fly that has a parasite

that actually gets transferred to humans.

There is a cure for it,
but diagnosis is extremely hard,

and large parts of Africa are actually
suffering with this disease.

Once we take a closer look,

we actually start to understand
how we talk to them.

There is a Facebook of this world.
Everybody is talking to everybody

- and now I'm talking not about just
our species but every other species

in some way is connected.
And so going out there

and looking at these things
tells us where those connections are.

So, we come back to the story.

I had a high school student at MIT

who walked into my office and
he was looking for a science project.

I was in my office and there was a fly
in my office buzzing around.

I build tools to study biology

and I said: "Geez, this looks like
a funny thing we should catch.

So this is the exact fly that we caught.

And I'm going to show you
very quickly

all kinds of amazing things
that are in there.

So, this is the first look.
You take any fly.

You give it a drop of water
with a little bit of sugar.

You look from the top,
just from any regular camera.

So, this is the mouth part
and it's fluctuating at around 7Hz.

The drop acts as a lens,
so you get to see a little deeper.

So, no other tools other than a camera.

The thing about this feeding mechanism

is the fact that physically
it should not be possible.

As you add more and more sugar to water,

it turns from water to honey.

Honey is really hard to pump.

It´s like cement at that length scales
when you go smaller.

How are these creatures doing something
that we have no idea how to do?

So, we go set up and experiment.

We built an X-ray microscope

- which is really fantastic because
we get to see what's in them

rather than just from the outside.

So, these are the images
of some of the flies.

And we press a button

- the same techonology
that you get CAT scans from.

We can do an exact morphological rendering

of every single muscle in the head of a fly.

I have to say the fly had to be sacrificed

for this particular experiment,

but you see all the little tiny details.

It turns out their feeding tube
goes through a hole in their brain,

which is very bizarre
for why that should be the case.

So, I'm actually just going
to show you the movies.

Let's see. So, this is the first time
anybody has ever seen --

For hundreds of years, we have known
the morphology of these things.

There have been entomologists out there.

This is the first time
that we can see live.

This is a fly feeding
with the head pointing upwards.

A tiny little drop.

And you notice that little loop
right there,

with the tiny little dark fluid.

So we spike up the fluid with
x-ray absorbing material

so you can actually see it,

and it's pulsating its little muscle at 7Hz.

And it has two passive valves
on the two sides

that open and close completely passively
to be able to actually regulate this pump.

So, let me show you another one
of a bumblebee,

which might be exciting.

So, what's going on is, as I just said,

there is that little dilator muscle
out there that's actually pulsating

at the same time it's switching
on and off

the two passive valves at the edge,

and that's how it's pumping fluids.

And it turns out this is
a very generic principle.

Then we went out there and
we caught everything we could

that would feed. It's very hard
to feed these things.

They will die but they will not eat
what you've offered.

So, we turn out, bumblebees,
we know what they feed.

This is a bumblebee.

It's hard to see but if you notice,
it's a very similar mechanism

working with very similar principles.

So, these are very generic principles
when you go out and look for them.

You might ask: Oh, is this even useful?

That's the first infusion pump
that we built.

We still put motors and gears

inside human bodies
for implantable devices.

This is a far better way

of doing something like that
if you actually want

a real solution that will last
for a very long time.

I'm going to close very quickly.
I think I'm running out of time.

What can you do out there?

Take your bag of tools,
whatever those tools are,

and go on a walk.
Look at stuff, find stuff.

If you find something
that you don't know, go pick it up.

Actually, figure out what it is,
what it does, talk to your friends.

And we organize these walks
for basically everybody on campus

to go out there and --
make your own discovery.

And, believe me, it's fairly easy
once you start poking at these things,

because there are so many of them.

Thank you so much!

(Applause)