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fuckyouclarke · 5 years

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Clarke stans have no right at all to judge Murphy for his actions this season - especially from this week’s episode. You have given Clarke a free pass for all the times she has either A) hurt Murphy or B) been willing to let him die for “the greater good”.

Clarke has accused him of killing Wells which led to his hanging, suggested he be banished, said they would kill him when he returned to camp after having been tortured by the Grounders if he didn’t give them the information needed, accused him of Finn’s village massacre, left him in Polis w/ Ontari where he was later raped by her, chained him and Emori up against their will and was going to use them as lab rats, was one of the core reasons he was shot in 5x13.

Clarke has done ALL of this, and you excuse every single one of them, either saying that A) Murphy had it coming and he deserved it or B) Clarke had “no choice”.

While at the same time, you completely ignore all the times MURPHY has saved Clarke’s life at the risk of his own.

He helped Bellamy take care of her head injury in 2x08 - even after she accused him of Finn’s massacre, he stayed in Polis w/ her and attempted to comfort her after Lexa’s death and refused to leave her behind - and then she later left HIM behind, he went up the tower w/ Bellamy and co in 3x15 to save her and pumped Ontari’s heart w/ his bare hands to keep her alive while she was in the CoL in 3x16, he willingly got out of the Rover in 5x05 to give Spacekru a head start in alerting her and Bellamy about the incoming missiles - all the while KNOWING that the shock collar had a tether on it and he was being tracked by McCreary, he stopped her from killing herself in 6x02 and then moments later, stopped Bellamy from killing her...which ended up w/ him LITERALLY DYING.

You don’t get to judge Murphy for his actions when he, after having been shot twice, stabbed, drowned and died in 1-2 weeks alone, went to Hell and was resurrected by a creepy 12-eyed snake that was used on Gabriel. You don’t get to judge Murphy for his actions when CLARKE HERSELF was right there in the room w/ him when he woke up screaming and terrified, traumatized and shaken to his LITERAL CORE and being right there when he said he was going to Hell. You don’t get to judge Murphy when he was shaken horribly when he found out that Clarke was “dead” and Josephine was wearing Clarke’s face and offering him a chance to avoid Hell. You don’t get to judge Murphy in this week’s episode when Josephine THREATENED TO KILL HIM AND EMORI if he backed out of their deal, after he found out that Clarke was still alive. You don’t get to judge Murphy when he finally refused to go through w/ it, and gave Bellamy the information he needed on Gabriel to help them save Clarke - all the while having a scalpel held against his neck.

And what did Murphy get after that?

He got stabbed AGAIN. Only this time, in the femoral artery, where Josephine knew he would bleed out and die. He knew what he was risking when he chose to betray Josephine; he knew he was risking being killed and going to Hell. And HE STILL DID IT.

And yet Clarke stans have the NERVE to judge him and say that he should die and that his character is “destroyed”?! When you LITERALLY have defended every single action and betrayal Clarke committed in season 5 ALONE - against Spacekru as a whole, Octavia, Bellamy, Murphy, Raven, Shaw, Wonkru, Madi, etc.

No, you don’t get to do that.

#anti clarke #anti clarke griffin #anticlarke #anti clarke stans #john murphy #season 6 spoilers

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redrikki · 4 years

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Miscellaneous Fandom Fic Masterlist

The 100

Born to Float - Octavia became a criminal with her first breath. Some people are just born to float. (Octavia Blake, Bellamy Blake, Aurora Blake)

Post-Apocalyptic Ethics 101 - Collection of dribbles & short stories. (Bellamy Blake, Clarke Griffin, Marcus Kane, Jasper Jordan)

Coin Operated Boy - The things John Murphy does to survive. Tag to 3.10. Trigger Warning: RAPE. (John Murphy/Emori, Murphy/Ontari)

Battlestar Galactica

Persephone on New Caprica - It’s winter on New Caprica and they’re all Persephone here. A collection of short stories. (Gaius Baltar/Caprica Six, Felix Gaeta/Eight, Kara Tharce/Leoben Conroy)

Four Loves (The Canoodling on New Caprica Remix) - Three loves which died on New Caprica and one which flourished. Remix of Canoodling & Conspiracies Oh My! by raktajino. (Maya & Isis, Diana Seelix & Jammer, Boomer & God, Laura Roslin/William Adama)

The Broken Earth series Seismic Shift - Schaffa tells himself he will stop if Eitz says no. This one will be allowed to say no. The boy says nothing at all. (Schaffa, Eitz) WARNING: Child Sexual Abuse

Dark Angel

Tricks & Treats - Joshua and Alec go to a party. Joshua eats little hot dogs and is diverting. (Joshua, Alec, Rita)

Another Day at the Office - Insert zombie apocalypse. (Alec, Original Cindy, Normal)

Pooka Boo - Maybe Ben’s hallucinations started out random and fluffy too. (Alec, Max, Logan, Original Cindy, Pooka)

Dollhouse

Ms. Lonelyhearts - Adelle knew Victor was a lover at heart. (Adelle Dewitt/Victor, Sierra/Victor)

Downton Abbey

The Hedgehog’s Dilemma - “Mind my spikes.” Five warnings, four relationships and one revelation. Daemons AU. (Thomas Barrow/Duke, Thomas & Sara O'Brien, Thomas/Edward Courtney, Thomas/Jimmy Kent)

Bluestocking Girl - Four books which didn’t change Edith’s life and one letter to the editor which did. (Edith Crawley, Crawley family)

Snakes & Lions - In Thomas, Jimmy finds that courage isn’t exclusive to Gryffindors. Now if only he could find some himself. Harry Potter fusion. Part one of Houses Alike In Dignity (Thomas Barrow/Jimmy Kent)

The House Elf and the Lioness - “Honestly Sybil, he’s practically a house elf,” Mary exclaimed when she caught them kissing in the stacks. Harry Potter fusion. Part two of Houses Alike In Dignity (Sybil Crawley/Tom Branson, Mary Crawley)

The Owl & the Son-of-a-Squib - Matthew Crawley is quite shocked when an owl swoops down and drops off a letter which changes his life. Harry Potter fusion. Part three of Houses Alike In Dignity (Matthew Crawley, Isobel Crawley, Violet Crawley)

The Dragon Prince

Dragon Scales - Collection of short tumblr prompts. (Rayla, Callum, Ezran, Amaya, Soren) You Fight Like You Practice - Callum’s never been good with a sword, but the right teacher can make all the difference. Two lessons, two teachers, and one real fight. (Callum, Soren, Rayla) The Talk - Rayla and Callum finally talk about what happened the night of the assassination. (Rayla, Callum, Ezran)

Firefly

Firefly, In Brief - Collection of short stories and dribbles. (Firefly crew)

Will to Be Well (The Psychosomatic Remix) - Studies on the efficacy of acupuncture are inconclusive but, if River believes hard enough, learning the art might make her better. Remix of If I Could Will You Whole by Spiralleds (River, Inara, Jayne)

Harry Potter

Have to Start Somewhere (The Words to Rebuild Remix) - This diary belongs to Ginevra Molly Weasley and no one else. Remix of Words to Build by Elennare. (Ginny Weasley)

Interstellar

Eureka Moment - The night she solved the equation, Murph had unprotected sex for the first time in her life. (Murph/Getty)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Requiescat in pace - In which Jonathan Strange discovers that returning the dead to their natural state is more difficult than he would imagine. (Jonathan Strange, dead Neapolitans)

Miraculous Ladybug

Intrepid Reporter - Alya won’t let a little thing like danger stop her from reporting the truth. (Alya, Marinette, Nino) Better Than Ice Cream - Orange, mint, and raspberry could be a tasty combination. The solution to every love triangle should be polyamory, but sometimes it’s just not that simple. (Marinette, Adrien) St. Athanase Day - Adrien and Marinette’s beret the second time around. She forgets the card but still signs her work. (Adrien, Plagg) No Sleep Til Hawkmoth - An overly-caffeinated revelation helps narrow Alya’s search for Hawkmoth (Alya, Marinette, Adrien, Nino, Chloé)

Misfits

Good Housekeeping - It’s been months since his mum kicked him out, but at least Nathan hasn’t sunk to sleeping under the flyover. He’s got a good thing going at the community center and means to keep it. (Nathan Young)

The (Non)Haunting of Nathan Young -And to think he’d scoffed when Simon had tried to warn him. Everyone you love will die. What a laugh, right? Christ, he’s been such an idiot. (Nathan Young/Kelly Bailey)

Pushing Daisies

Li'l Gumshoe - Young Penny Cod was nine years, two hours, and forty-three minutes old when she found the book which changed her life. Like hundreds of other little black girls who would encounter Li’l Gumshoe, she felt as though it had been written just for her. The difference was, Penny Cod was right. (Penny Cod, Emerson Cod, Lila Robinson, Pie Hole gang)

Orphan Black

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl - There’s something magical about Uncle Felix’s flat. Maybe it’s all the art. (Kira, Felix, Cosima)

Devil’s Trap - Helena and Grace have a lot in common. (Helena, Grace)

Despite All My Rage - Rachel is still just a rat in a cage. So much for self-directed evolution. (Rachel, Aldous Leekie, Ethan Duncan)

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Shadow Over Mystacor - After Shadow Weaver’s attack on Mystacor, Adora just wants to relax, but that’s hard to do when it’s all her fault. (Adora, Glimmer, Bow)

Parting Strands - Looking out for each other had been their thing, but Adora’s starting to suspect that’s over. Her thoughts during that scene in “Promise.” (Adora, Catra)

The Good Soldier On the sliding scale between perfect soldier Adora and useless malcontent Catra, Lonnie was closer to the Adora end of the spectrum. How the hell had Catra made Force Captain before her? Catra was just going crash and burn and Lonnie? Lonnie would let her. (Lonnie, Catra, Team Horde)

She-Ra (Modesty) Shorts - Adora/Catra shorts written for the 3 Sentence Ficathon. (Adora/Catra)

A Song of Ice and Fire

The Return - Robb sends Theon home to Pyke. If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention. (Asha Greyjoy, Greyjoy family)

Stranger Things

Smurfete Principle - There can be more than one girl in the party. El and Max work things out at the Snow Ball. (Max, El)

Stranger Side of the Force - While watching Star Wars, El notices she and Vader have a lot in common. (El, Mike, Max, Lucas, Dustin, Will)

It Lingers - The Mind Flayer is gone, but El can still feel it clawing underneath her skin. (El, Joyce, Will, Jonathan) Date Night - Everyone and her mother seems to think they’re together and Robin’s getting pretty sick of it. (Robin, Steve, The Party)

Temeraire

Epistolary - Dear Lady Allendale….yours, etc., Emily Roland (Emily Roland)

Umbrella Academy

Heroes for Ghosts - Eudora waits for Diego and things at the hotel go very differently. (Klaus, Diego, Ben, Eudora, Hazel, Cha-Cha, Ghosts)

Peanut Butter and Marshmallows - Stuck in the apocalypse, Five reads about Vanya leaving him sandwiches. (Five, Delores)

Iconic - When Vanya learns Klaus is gay from an article in a teen magazine, she’s upset for more than a few reasons. (Vanya, Klaus) Feed Your Head - Three shitty things young Klaus did for drugs and one thing they did for him. (Klaus, Reginald, Grace) When Evil Rains - Umbrella Academy shorts (Klaus, Diego)

Voltron: Legendary Defender

Players Only Love You When They’re Playing - Coran kept staring at Romelle like she was walking miracle, but Allura couldn’t look at her without thinking of Lotor and his betrayal.

White Collar

Eyes on the Target (The Solid Ground Remix) - Peter asked her to keep an eye on Neal for him while he’s stuck in jail. It could be going better. Remix of Keep Your Feet on Solid Ground by frith_in_thorns. (Dianna Berrigan, Neal Caffrey, Peter Burke)

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desperate-entwives · 6 years

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on running

memori week day 1: canon divergent

(CW for rape implication, abuse implication.)

Otan cannot be gone.

“Your brother is waiting for you,” the man says. Emori looks him straight in the eyes, ignoring the impossibility of what he is telling her, ignoring the potential for grief, for destructive despair. Otan cannot be gone. It is firmly impossible. It cannot be true and she knows it’s true nonetheless but she won’t let the truth of it fill her eyes and spill over so this man can see. John never trusted this man, his former leader, so why should she trust him now?

“So is John,” he says and these are the words that instinctively guide her hand to his, guide her fingers to grasp the small metal chip he is offering. It looks innocuous. She knows it can’t be.

The chip is cool in Emori’s hand, and she can almost feel it humming against her skin. She could take it, let it dissolve in her mouth and change her on the inside the way this man has been changed, the way Otan was changed just a few days ago when she last saw him. This man is offering her a way to John if only she--

She closes her fist around the chip. “Thanks,” she says calmly and looks at this man, who she remembers from the desert and again from the shore, “but no.”

And then she is running.

She runs faster than her own grief. It can’t catch up to her when she does this. It is impossible.

When she stops moving to eat, to drink water, to grasp at her arms and not think about Otan’s death and John’s capture, the next step is obvious. John had to have been taken to Polis. He has to be alive still. She still feels his shadows on her skin from their time together, and she remembers the way he was wrenched from her mid-con, the quick intelligence of his speech when he talked his way out of a quick execution. He halted his own death by showing his captors the chip in his hand; perhaps, if she is intercepted, she can use the same trick.

But they would have to catch her first.

Emori has known many frikdreina in her life, and she’s always considered one of the lucky ones. Not lucky enough, of course. None of them are. But her mutation isn’t on her face. It doesn’t halt her movement. It doesn’t slow her speech or diminish her eyesight.

In the circles with whom she has traveled, the standard of measuring luck is based on how easily you can slip into a clan and facilitate a con. Emori, in that sense, is very lucky.

She doesn’t feel very lucky once she slows down and sneaks into Polis, passing as a food vendor. Her hands shake as she turns rat after rat over the fire and she keeps her wrapped left hand to the shadows, wishing she could diminish its size through sheer willpower. She knows how to make herself sound small, unworthy of attention. She knows how to be a shadow, but the grief is threatening to catch up with her and she cannot focus properly on the stillness, on the quality of deception. The grief is swift, the grief and its flashes of quick pain, of memory, of things that cannot be pushed aside.

(Otan, when they were children, adopting one another in the desert and stealing water jugs from sleeping travellers.

Otan, when they finally escaped Baylis, and his sobs wouldn’t stop, and she kept her hand wrapped tightly around his, as though the pressure of their closeness could erase the pain and the bitterness and the abuse.

Otan, meeting up with her in the desert through con after con, until she conned a group of travelers from the sky, until she met--)

“John,” she says softly, seeing him in the distance, following after the new commander. Grim, bitter, dressed in a flamekeeper’s ragged coat. Alive.

The procession is on the other side of the square and she cannot make it over to him before he disappears, but for the rest of the day, she listens for rumors about the new commander’s flamekeeper. When she hears speculation that they are lovers, she feels a strange mingling of jealousy and pride. He must be manipulating her for the sake of some con, and he is evidently doing it well. She thinks of her time with John in the woods, their moments in the cave, his warm, soft, scarred skin, and tries not to feel the pressure around her heart, so tight it feels like it could compress it to nothing.

The next day, the commander walks through her area of the market and there he is. So close she could run up to him, snake her around around his middle, grin against his back. She doesn’t, but she hisses, “Hey, stranger,” as he passes by.

His face when it breaks into a smile is so destructively beautiful that she could cry. But she doesn’t.

“Care for a bite?” she says instead.

“Emori,” he says, stepping closer, “what the hell are you doing here?”

She could be subtle. She could control her body language so that it doesn’t angle toward him like their bodies belong close together, closer than anything, but she doesn’t. She leans in towards him. “Looking for you,” she whispers and their eyes meet, and she sees the joy and the pain and everything else, all written there in his eyes. He has been hurt. He is hurting.

When she approaches the meeting place, she can tell he’s tense. He’s afraid of who might be watching, who might be noticing he’s gone.

She has felt him gone every day since he was taken. Now, his presence is a complicated gift. But she still sneaks up on him and relishes the way he grins when he sees it’s her, the way he tugs her into the small torch-lit room, the soft persistence of his mouth on hers.

“Quick,” she says into his mouth and she doesn’t know why she says it except that she does know. She wants him, she wants him before this is all over, before he gets taken from her again. She wants to run with him while she can, before she’s running alone again, and with nothing to run towards.

He sees something in her eyes and pulls back. “Emori? What’s wrong?”

And she could ask him the same question and she tries to bite back the cry in her throat but it comes out anyway. “It’s Otan,” she manages, and then she’s in his arms and he’s holding her like she’s going to slip away if he lets up for one moment.

She doesn’t know why, but she tells him about a day in her childhood when she and Otan decided to hide from one another in the woods. It was a stupid child’s game, and very dangerous for children like them, and she wound up so lost that she didn’t see her brother for an entire day. When she did find him, he was shivering and sad and lost and she told him that from then on, they would always be together and she would always make sure he was warm.

Before John leaves to go back to the commander, he tells her.

“She’s taken a liking to me,” he says. They’re sitting side-by-side on the floor; the torrent of her grief is behind them, and when she looks at him, she can tell this is where is pain resides.

“Taken a liking?” she says, but she knows what it means. He draws his hand away from hers guiltily; she grasps it back, even as her heart tightens again.

“I don’t have a choice,” he says, and she realizes the rumors were wrong. He isn’t the new Heda’s lover; he’s something worse entirely.

Her flood of emotions is indecipherable. There must be a way, she thinks, to kill this woman and flee Polis with John, to find their cave again, and their furs, and the brief life they’d built together. That impossible warmth they’d found, something like the feeling of their hands clasped while running.

But first. He had just listened to the torrent of her grief. She faces him, moves a strand of hair out of his eyes.

“Tell me, John,” she says, meaning the pain and the hurt and the torment and the hope. Please, she thinks, tell me about all of it.

And he does.

#memoriweek #happy memori week here's a piece about otan lmao #rough draft; weird title #rape cw #memori #memorifics #dailymemori #infernalandmortal #a Much More Vulnerable emori than I usually write #the 100 3x12 #memori appreciation week #my fic #some memori writing

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ezatluba · 5 years

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The Mysteries of Animal Movement

A scientist’s unfettered curiosity leads him to investigate the physics at work in some very odd corners of the natural world.

By James Gorman

Nov. 5, 2018

David Hu was changing his infant son’s diaper when he got the idea for a study that eventually won him the Ig Nobel prize. No, not the Nobel Prize — the Ig Nobel prize, which bills itself as a reward for “achievements that make people laugh, then think.”

As male infants will do, his son urinated all over the front of Dr. Hu’s shirt, for a full 21 seconds. Yes, he counted off the time, because for him curiosity trumps irritation.

That was a long time for a small baby, he thought. How long did it take an adult to empty his bladder? He timed himself. Twenty-three seconds. “Wow, I thought, my son urinates like a real man already.”

He recounts all of this without a trace of embarrassment, in person and in “How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls: Animal Movements and the Robotics of the Future,” just published, in which he describes both the silliness and profundity of his brand of research.

No one who knows Dr. Hu, 39, would be surprised by this story. His family, friends, the animals around him — all inspire research questions.

His wife, Jia Fan, is a marketing researcher and senior data scientist at U.P.S. When they met, she had a dog, and he became intrigued by how it shook itself dry. So he set out to understand that process.

Now, he and his son and daughter sometimes bring home some sort of dead animal from a walk or a run. The roadkill goes into the freezer, where he used to keep frozen rats for his several snakes. (The legless lizard ate dog food). “My first reaction is not, oh, it’s gross. It’s ‘Do we have space in our freezer,’” Dr. Fan said.

He also saves earwax and teeth from his children, and lice and lice eggs from the inevitable schoolchild hair infestations. “We have separate vials for lice and lice eggs,” he pointed out.

“I would describe him as an iconoclast,” Dr. Fan said, laughing. “He doesn’t follow the social norms.”

Dr. Hu with his 2015 Ig Nobel Prize, for showing that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in 21 seconds.

He does, however, follow in the footsteps of his father, a chemist who also loved collecting dead things. Once, on a family camping trip, his father brought home a road-killed deer that he sneaked into the garage under cover of night.

The butchering, a first time event for everyone in the family, he wrote once in a father’s day essay for his dad, “was an intense learning and sensory experience. There were a lot of organs in an animal, I learned.”

His own curiosity has led him to investigations of eyelashes and fire ants, water striders and horse tails, frog tongues and snakes.

Dr. Hu is a mathematician in the Georgia Tech engineering department who studies animals. His seemingly oddball work has drawn both the ire of grandstanding senators and the full-throated support of at least one person in charge of awarding grants from that bastion of frivolity, the United States Army.

Long before his role in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, put three of Dr. Hu’s research projects on a list of the 20 most wasteful federally funded scientific studies. The television show, “Fox and Friends,” featured Sen. Flake’s critique.

Naturally, Dr. Hu made the attack on his work the basis for a TEDx talk at Emory University, in which he took a bow for being “the country’s most wasteful scientist” and went on to argue that Sen. Flake completely misunderstood the nature of basic science.

Dr. Hu was tickled to think that one scientist could be responsible for such supposed squandering of the public’s money. Neither he nor his supporters were deterred.

Among those supporters is Samuel C. Stanton, a program manager at the Army Research Office in Durham, N.C., which funded Dr. Hu’s research on whether fire ants were a fluid or a solid. (More on that and the urination findings later.)

Dr. Stanton does not share Dr. Hu’s flippant irreverence. He speaks earnestly of the areas of science to which he directs Army money, including “nonequilibrium information physics, embodied learning and control, and nonlinear waves and lattices.”

So he is completely serious when he describes Dr. Hu as a scientist of “profound courage and integrity” who “goes where his curiosity leads him.”

Dr. Hu has “an uncanny ability to identify and follow through on scientific questions that are hidden in plain sight,” Dr. Stanton said.

When it comes to physics, the Army and Dr. Hu have a deep affinity. They both operate at human scale in the world outside the lab, where conditions are often wet, muddy or otherwise difficult.

In understanding how physics operates in such conditions, Dr. Stanton explained, “the vagaries of the real world really come to play in an interesting way.”

Besides, Dr. Stanton said, the Army is not, as some people might imagine, always “looking for a widget or something to go on a tank.” It is interested in fundamental insights and original thinkers. And the strictures of the hunt for grants and tenure in science can sometimes act against creativity.

Sometimes, Dr. Stanton said, part of his job is convincing academic scientists “to lower their inhibitions.”

Needless to say, with Dr. Hu that’s not really been an issue.

Dr. Hu has shown that the ideal eyelash length for mammals, like this sheep, is one-third the width of an eyeball.CreditGuillermo Amador

An aspiring doctor is led astray

“Applied mathematicians have always been kind of playful,” Dr. Hu said recently while talking about his academic background — although they are perhaps not quite as playful as he can be. A few years ago he did gymnastic flips onto the stage of a Chinese game show that sometimes showcases scientists.

He grew up in Bethesda, Md., and while he was still in high school, he did his first published work on the strength of metals that had been made porous. He was a semifinalist for the Westinghouse Science Prize (the forerunner of the Regeneron Science Search) and won several other awards.

That work helped him get into M.I.T., which he entered as a pre-med student planning to get an M.D./Ph.D.

He was soon led astray.

Dr. Hu’s undergraduate adviser at M.I.T. was Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, a mathematician who works to describe real life processes in rigorous mathematical terms.

Dr. Mahadevan, known to students and colleagues as Maha, investigated wrinkling, for example. Naturally he won an Ig Nobel for that work.

“Maha lit the fire,” Dr. Hu said. Before he encountered his adviser’s research, he said, “It didn’t really make sense that you could make a living just playing with things.”

But he came to see the possibilities.

He stayed at M.I.T. for graduate work, in the lab of his adviser, John Bush, a geophysicist. Dr. Bush remembers him as very enthusiastic.

Asked by email about some of Dr. Hu’s wilder forays into the physics of everyday life, he said, “A sense of playfulness is certainly a good thing in science, especially for reaching a broader audience.” But, he said, “targeting silly problems is not a good strategy, and I know that David has taken considerable flack for it.”

Dr. Hu may be the first third-generation (in terms of scientific pedigree) Ig Nobel winner, because Dr. Mahadevan studied under the late Joseph Keller, a mathematician at Stanford University. Dr. Keller won two Ig Nobels. One was for studying why ponytails swing from side-to-side, rather than up and down, when the ponytail owner is jogging. The other was an examination of why teapots dribble.

After M.I.T., Dr. Hu did research at the Courant Institute at New York University, another hotbed of real-world mathematics. He moved to Georgia Tech, after Jeannette Yen, a biologist there, told the university they ought to take a look at him.

From ants to self-assembling robots

Dr. Hu’s research may seem like pure fun, but much of it is built on the idea that how animals move and function can provide inspiration for engineers designing human-made objects or systems.

The title of Dr. Hu’s book refers to the “robots of the future,” and he emphasizes the way animal motion offers insights that can be applied to engineering — Bio-inspired design.

When Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands flood, for instance, fire ants form rafts so tightly interlaced that water doesn’t penetrate their mass. When he picked up such a mass in the lab, Dr. Hu writes, it felt like a pile of salad greens.

“The raft was springy, and if I squeezed it down to a fraction of its height, it recoiled back to its original shape. If I pulled it apart, it stretched like cheese on a pizza.”

He found out that the ants were constantly moving even though the shape of the mass stayed more or less the same. They were breaking and making connections all the time, and they became, in essence, a “self-healing” material.

The idea is appealing for many engineering applications, including concrete that mends itself and robots that self-assemble into large, complex structures. Depending on the force applied to them, a mass of a hundred thousand ants or so can form a ball or a tower, or flow like a liquid.

He and students in his lab also showed that the reason mosquitoes don’t get bombed out of the air by water droplets in a rainstorm is that they are so light that the air disturbed by a falling drop of water blows the mosquitoes aside. The finding could have applications for tiny drones.

They also showed that the ideal length for a row of mammalian eyelashes is one-third the width of an eyeball. That gives just the right windbreak to keep blowing air from drying out the surface of the eye. Artificial membranes could use some kind of artificial eyelashes.

And what about urination? It didn’t make sense to Dr. Hu that a grown man and an infant would have roughly the same urination time.

After he sent out undergraduates, under the guidance of Patricia Yang, a graduate student, to time urination in all the animals at the Atlanta Zoo, the situation became even more puzzling. Most mammals took between 10 and 30 seconds, with an average of 21 seconds. (Small animals do things differently.)

The key was the urethra, essentially a pipe out of the bladder, that enhanced the effect of gravity. Even a small amount of fluid in a narrow pipe can develop high pressure, with astonishing effects.

Water poured through a narrow pipe into a large wooden barrel can split the barrel. Dr. Hu said the experiment, known as Pascal’s barrel, can be replicated nowadays with Tupperware.

“Applied mathematicians have always been kind of playful.”

What is interesting about the urethra biologically is that its proportions, length to diameter, stay roughly the same no matter the size of the animal (as long as it weighs more than about six and a half pounds).

The 21-second average urination time must be evolutionarily important. Perhaps any longer would attract predators? But then predators are subject to the same rule. In any case, the principle of how to effectively drain a container of fluid could be useful, Dr. Hu wrote in the original studies, to designers of “water towers, water backpacks and storage containers.”

As usual, in his book Dr. Hu does not neglect the human side of his work, or treat it too seriously. He refers to the urethra as a pee-pee pipe. And he corrects his son when he brags that only he, not his sister, has a pee-pee pipe.

Not so, Dr. Hu insists. The urethra is present in males and females.

Once older, his children may never forgive him for this book. But middle school science teachers and nerds everywhere will thank him.

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