One small step for man, one giant leap for spiderkind

In ‘scream, run out of the room, scream some more then flap your hands pointlessly in the air’ news this week: Scientists have trained a spider to jump. On demand.

Apparently, they’re interested in understanding how they do it as it might be handy when designing robots. To clarify, the scientists are interested... I’m guessing the spiders already know how they do it.

If the world isn’t already scary enough, boffins in lab coats training 8-legged nightmares to leap when they want them to sounds awfully like the sort of thing you see at the start of a film which soon has hordes of people dying, and deranged scientists with wild hair saying things like “Now they’ll pay for mocking me for being in Dungeons and Dragons Club when I was 14!”. Probably followed by laugh along the lines of “Bwooooahahahahaaaa!”

Kim (yes, they gave it a name) can leap six times the length of her own, hairy, body, and normally uses her skills for pouncing on prey, rather than amusing bored science nerds.

I can’t say I particularly want an army of robotic spiders flinging themselves at me. I already have to contend with my insect nemesis, the flying horror that is the daddy-longlegs.

There’s no mention of Kim being trained to do anything that could be classed as evil, but they’re unlikely to mention that bit first, are they?

Buy a couple of extra copies of this paper and roll them up – you never know when the invasion might start.

This post first appeared as the second piece in my column/page in The Mail and News & Star, on the 11th of May 2018. The title was truncated to just "One giant leap for spiderkind". Two pictures were used - one of a spider, and another captioned "Nemesis: A daddy-longlegs".

Seriously - I bloody hate daddy-longlegs. The gits.

(CD A-Z: The RCD Blues Collection.)

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