Reminds me of this pretty common but all the more spectacular: a close-up of super complex production line (gene transcription) driven by DNA strands: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY</a> / <a href="https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/7Hk9jct2ozY" rel="nofollow">https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/7Hk9jct2ozY</a>
I was just thinking about this. Does folding your hands count as a gear? The interlocked fingers make for a tighter grasp. When viewed from the palm side they even look like a gear. It is not the natural state of the hands but many gears also spend time in an unmeshed state. What is the definition of a gear anyway?
If we had never invented gears, but somehow had invented microscopes, we might've eventually stumbled on this insect and gotten the idea for mechanical gears from observing its legs.<p>What other things on the technology tree did we skip over and might we discover out in some insect, bird or fish?<p>We still don't know how tiny insect brains are capable of using so little energy to do so much navigation and learning+memory, right?
Pure blogspam.<p><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/this-insect-has-the-only-mechanical-gears-ever-found-in-nature-6480908/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/this-insect-ha...</a>