报告题目：

New scaling principles in biology: grooming, shaking and urination

报告人:                                Dr. David Hu

Georgia Institute of Technology

时间：2014年7月4日(周五)   10:00

地点：中科院力学所主楼344会议室

报告摘要：

To stay clean, animals must remove fluids and particles from the inside and outside of their bodies.  In this talk, we present new principles for efficient removal of contaminants.  We show how bees groom themselves by brushing their hairy bodies, which serves to catapult accumulated dust and pollen at 100 times gravity.  Mosquitoes remove accumulated water drops by either beating their wings and crash landing.  Wet mammals from mice to bears shake their bodies at 2-30 rotations per second to release water drops and stay dry. Mammals, from mice to elephants release varying volumes of urine from 5 mL to 18 L, in the same duration of 21 seconds.  We show simple experiments that reveal scaling laws for each of these behaviors as a function of body size, and rationalize the power law exponents in terms of the relevant fluid mechanics.

报告人简介：

Dr. David Hu is a mechanical engineer who studies the movement of animals. He has studied how snakes slither, how insects walk on water, and how small insects fly through rain.  His laboratory has invented new animal-like robots such as Robostrider which walks on water and Scalybot, which moves by virtue of its belly scales.  He lives in Atlanta with his wife Jia and children, Harry and Heidi.

Hu is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biology and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology.  His degrees are in mechanical engineering and mathematics at M.I.T. and his postdoctoral work was at NYU.  He has published in Nature, PNAS, Physics Today and American Scientist, and his work been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, Audobon, Smithsonian, Scholastic, and others.  He has been invited guest on Good Morning America, Discovery Channel, National Public Radio, and in the film Fire Ants 3D: The Invincible Army, available on NetFlix. These videos and more may be found at his website, Hoogle at http://www.me.gatech.edu/hu/