Name: How This Beetle Could Help Solve Our Water Crisis | Evolutionary Tech
Uploaded: 2020-10-23T21:42:29.000Z
Duration: 5 min 14 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...

He's thirsty, parched, and surrounded by fresh water

This isn't actually a riddle, it's a real problem

scientists have been trying to solve for years.

And the solution might just be this little beetle.

Two-thirds of people on Earth face an extreme water shortage

Half a billion don't have enough water year-round.

And these numbers are only expected to rise

in traditional water sources, they make up for in fog,

It's one of the oldest and driest places in the world.

Depending on how far you are from the coast,

rainfall averages about a half-inch to two inches per year.

But it's what we would consider a fog desert,

a place where fog is the main water source

for plant and animal life, like the Namib Desert beetle.

would seem to be really bad at capturing fog.

and our current fog-collecting technology

And this one represents the mesh's ability

to drain the collected droplets into a reservoir

So, based on the formula, the Namib Desert beetle

Since, you know, beetles aren't made of mesh.

and fog basks, leaning down and into the wind.

As simple as that sounds, it's very literally

like trying to catch a cloud and pin it down.

Hunter King: If you wave your fingers through mist,

you don't see just a path where your fingers were

It just flows with the air, right through them.

Narrator: But the beetle manages to do what we cannot.

Narrator: A lot of research has been done

on how the water moves to the beetle's mouth,

how the droplets get there in the first place.

Hunter King and his team tried to find the answer

that scientists started researching first had exactly that,

And those bumps were theorized to have an impact

King: It turns out the beetle that has the bumps

Narrator: King and his team decided to move forward

In the lab, they 3D-printed spheres and cylinders

with various surface textures, smooth, ridged, and bumpy.

They then put the spheres in a foggy wind tunnel.

Turns out the sphere with one millimeter bumps

captured fog 2.5 times better than the smooth sphere.

that are maybe a little bit like the beetle

you go up to something like a factor of two,

Narrator: Further research in partnership

with computational fluid dynamics experts

at the University of Illinois, zoomed in even closer.

that tested droplets' ability to bump into a surface.

Tiny water droplets have very little inertia,

and have to squeeze a film of air out of the way

The model found that the less squeezing droplets have to do,

which is what you should get with rougher textures.

for harnessing and recreating these properties

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How This Beetle Could Help Solve Our Water Crisis | Evolutionary Tech

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