Topic: Snake robot fire hose

[Nemesis]

Link to full article

It is intelligent and moves with the aid of hydraulic pressure and co-ordinated joint movements. A snake robot can perform life-saving operations during a fire, an explosion and in other hostile environments.

Try to picture a snake-like robot that can move into places that are too dangerous for humans to enter. The snake can climb up stairs, force past beams and twist itself round corners. Imagine that it has a built-in advanced water tap that not only can be turned on and off, but can allow the direction of the water flow to be altered.

[Bonk]

That sounds pretty darn cool, creative idea. 

[Nemesis]

A different type of snake article.

An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates, a radical new theory suggests.

[Bonk]

Saw that one. It seems there is a grain of truth in most biblical mythology... the serpent and the tree of knowledge, pain of child birth and all that. (Though one could see it just as validly from a creationist standpoint in that evolutionary theories paralleling religious mythology is no accident.)

My favorite thought in that vein is best expressed by Ernst Haeckel's Biogenetic Law: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny. While not perfectly valid the idea has some merit and leads one to the more valid concept of Neoteny.

Desmond Morris's dated but influential text The Naked Ape, Carl Sagan's Pulitzer winning The Dragons of Eden and Barrow & Tipler's Anthropic Cosmological Principle are all texts that have infuenced my thinking in this regard.