What Is The Holy Grail...? Sounds Intriguing.

[BIAD]

I don't know if this a fluff-piece or not, but if true, it does have a vague connection to what we were discussing.

Spiders fly hundreds of miles using Earth's electric field, study finds.

'Young naturalist Charles Darwin was fascinated by the spiders that landed on HMS Beagle in October 1832 as
the ship headed for Buenos Aries. He concluded that the creatures must have floated over from the Argentinian
mainland. 

Since then scientists have marvelled how spiders get airborne, with some believing spiders’ silk thread catches in the wind.
Others believed the strands became electrostatically charged –allowing the spiders to ride Earth’s natural electric fields.



Now scientists, Erica Morley and Daniel Robert at Bristol University have conducted the first tests on whether electrostatic
forces are used in what has been nicknamed spider “ballooning”. And they have concluded the creatures can fly on electric
fields.

To take flight, a spider typically climbs to the top of a plant, tiptoes around, points its abdomen in the air and rapidly ejects
up to a metre of silk. University researchers were able to showed that spiders can detect electric fields in a lab experiment,
the Atlantic reported.

They did this by putting the arachnids on vertical strips of cardboard in the centre of a plastic box.
Next electric fields were generated between the floor and ceiling of similar strengths to what the spiders would experience
outdoors.

These fields ruffled tiny sensory hairs on the spiders’ feet –"like when you rub a balloon and hold it up to your hairs,” Miss Morley
explained. The spiders then performed a set of movements called tiptoeing –standing on the ends of their legs and poking their
abdomens in the air. 

Despite being in closed boxes with no airflow some of the arachnids even managed to take off.
And when Miss Morley turned off the electric fields inside the boxes, they dropped.

Peter Gorham, a physicist, showed that spiders propelling themselves on silk as a result of a magnetic field was mathematically
possible in 2013. He praised the scientist's work, saying: “As a physicist, it seemed very clear to me that electric fields played a
central role, but I could only speculate on how the biology might support this.
Morley and Robert have taken this to a level of certainty that far exceeds any expectations I had.”...'

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