Name: 【TED-Ed】The physics of sperm vs. the physics of sperm whales - Aatish Bhatia
Uploaded: 2014-05-03T06:41:46.000Z
Duration: 4 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

it will stop in about a millionth of a second.

It all has to do with being really small.

Microscopic creatures inhabit a world alien to us,

But why does size matter so much for a swimmer?

It's you and a whole bunch of water molecules.

say you were about the size of a water molecule,

all of a sudden, it's like you're swimming

is like another person you have to push past

figured out that there is one simple number

that can predict how a fluid will behave.

it can coast ahead for an incredible distance.

If a sperm were to stop flapping its tail,

it wouldn't even coast past a single atom.

To imagine what it would feel like to be a sperm,

about as slow as the minute hand of a clock,

So, how do microbes manage to get anywhere?

that waits for the grass under its mouth to grow back.

and this is where those incredible adaptations come in.

But there's an even more ingenious solution

Instead of wagging their paddles back and forth,

converts winding motion into forward motion,

these tiny creatures spin their helical tails

in a world where water feels as thick as cork.

They use grappling hooks to pull themselves along.

like a sling shot and fling themselves forward.

H. pylori lives only in the slimy, acidic mucus