Yet another Hacker News

How octopuses squeeze through too small gaps

28 points bookofjoe 7 hours ago 4 comments

Paper: https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/229/21/jeb252825...

Videos (from the paper):

https://movie.biologists.com/video/10.1242/jeb.252825/video-...

hatthew 51 minutes ago | parent

I love that their justification for this study is robots. I think science for the sake of learning is good and justification isn't always necessary. But it's so funny that we've moved beyond search and rescue as a justification for cool robots, to cool robots as a justification for studying octopi.

alsobrsp 42 minutes ago | parent

We lost that with the decline of the corporate research labs. PARC, Bell Labs, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, and such are shadows of what they used to be if they are even still around. Those facilities used to look at long range ideas and we are still reaping the benefits. Most research now is product centric, looking maybe 2 years ahead. I blame the tax cuts of the 80s and 90s.

Amorymeltzer 14 minutes ago | parent

Well, that and the faux-/manufactured outrage from US Congress. Things like Coburn's waste book were designed to lampoon and degrade seemingly silly or wasteful basic-science research from just a cursory overview of the title or cherry-picked facts. That's part of a larger agenda alongside cutting basic research for cuts-sake, but it means that everyone in science is searching for a justification for even the most meager of funding. Human biomedical health is a good target—if you can come up with any plausible link, your odds of funding are better (maybe)—and I suppose robots aren't a bad one either.

The NSF has a list of responses to various such things: <https://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/wastebooks>

Crunchified 49 minutes ago | parent

How octopuses squeeze through too small gaps

Obligatory click-bait title comment...

The article describes how octopuses get through holes in one of two ways, one for larger holes and one for smaller holes.

Spoiler: An octopus cannot get through a gap that is too small.