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Airplane wing design: Design in nature was there first with owl wings

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They solve all kinds of problems we are still working on:

Owl wing design reduces aircraft, wind turbine noise pollution
The shape of owl wings, which help the animals fly quietly, can inform airfoil designs. Credit: Wang and Liu

Trailing-edge noise is the dominant source of sound from aeronautical and turbine engines like those in airplanes, drones, and wind turbines. Suppressing this noise pollution is a major environmental goal for some urban areas.

In Physics of Fluids, researchers from Xi’an Jiaotong University used the characteristics of owl wings to inform airfoil design and significantly reduce the trailing-edge noise.

“Nocturnal owls produce about 18 decibels less noise than other birds at similar flight speeds due to their unique wing configuration,” said author Xiaomin Liu. “Moreover, when the owl catches prey, the shape of the wings is also constantly changing, so the study of the wing edge configuration during owl flight is of great significance.”

American Institute of Physics, “Owl wing design reduces aircraft, wind turbine noise pollution” at Phys.org (January 18, 2022)

Rodents everywhere regret this development.

The paper is open access.

Comments
Outstanding repudiation of Sev's willful blindness, BA! I was not familiar with those Newton quotes before. Your eyes will be opened, someday, Sev. I hope you allow it before you breathe your last.AnimatedDust
January 20, 2022
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Martin_r first of all, lets wish Seversky Happy 5th birthday! … and lets give him some possible answers …
Nope Martin_r , Seversky didn't ask for technical explanations because is ignorant about engineering rules and is not interested about that . He is a professional troll because is easier to be troll than to be an engineer. Troll: how to make outrageous comments. (Instant diploma and gratification : atheists dream) :) Engineer: years and years of hard study and experimentation. They understand how many variables you have to consider when you engineer something . That's why you'll never hear an engineer asking such a stupid question. PS:It seems that Seversky would prefer to have night vision because he loves to eat live rats and mice . Hahaha!Lieutenant Commander Data
January 20, 2022
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first of all, lets wish Seversky Happy 5th birthday! ... and lets give him some possible answers ... Energy consumption ... There was a research on a cave fish - it lost eyes (because living in the dark) ... Researchers found out, that eyes consume a significant portion of energy (up to 15% of basal metabolism consumption ) ... Hard to say how much energy consume human eyes and eagle eyes .... First, some tech specs:
The Wedge-tailed eagle's retina has about 1 million rod and cone cells in 1 square millimeter of their retina. That's five times the human eye's amount of rods and cones in the same area. Furthermore, an eagle’s eye has approximately five times the number of light-receptor cells that we have. Practically each receptor is connected to a neuron. As a result, the eagle’s optic nerve, which carries messages from the eye to the brain, contains double the number of fibers found in that of a human.
so, i as an engineer can imagine, that eagle eye consume much more energy than a human eye (don't matter the size of the species) Now, the question is, if in real life is it worth to have such superb eyes with much higher energy consumption ... the question is, how a common person can make an use of such a super eye sight ... Also, i can imagine, that there might be some auto-focusing issues ...focusing back and forth, long distance, short distance ... but i might be wrong on this, from what i could understand, eagles have a good eye sight even for short distances ...martin_r
January 20, 2022
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Sev, >Owls can also see way better in the dark than we can. How come The Designer gave them better eyes than ours? Why would we be expected to know this? We are the lesser of the parties involved. Because we are (very) finite creatures, there will be many things we don't know and can't obtain (or understand) the answers to.EDTA
January 19, 2022
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@Seversky “ In other words, no one has any idea why we weren’t designed with better eyes as well as better brains.” You have been provided with answers. Making you understand them is beyond human ability. What God has left out, the coach can’t put in. You need a few more strings to your banjo.Belfast
January 19, 2022
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other words, no one has any idea why we weren’t designed with better eyes as well as better brains
As I said some of the stupidest comments yet on UD. You were given strong logical reasons.jerry
January 19, 2022
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Sev:
"Owls can also see way better in the dark than we can. How come The Designer gave them better eyes than ours?",,, "no one has any idea why we weren’t designed with better eyes as well as better brains"
Hubris is too mild a word.
hu·bris * n. excessive pride or self-confidence. * (in Greek tragedy) excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis. https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/performing-arts/theater/hubris nem·e·sis / ?nem?sis/ * n. (usu. one's nemesis) the inescapable or implacable agent of someone's or something's downfall: the balance beam was the team's nemesis, as two gymnasts fell from the apparatus. * a downfall caused by such an agent: one risks nemesis by uttering such words. * (often Nemesis) retributive justice: nemesis is notoriously slow. https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/ancient-religions/ancient-religion/nemesis
Sir Isaac Newton himself, (the father of modern physics), wholeheartedly disagreed with Seversky.,,, for instance Newton asked, "Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it?"
“Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowells) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped & fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with man kind to beleive that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therfore to be feared.” (Sir Isaac Newton, A Short Scheme of the True Religion) https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00007
And Sir Isaac Newton, (again the father of modern physics), would be far more impressed with the 'physics' of the eye, (and of the brain), revealed by science nowadays, than he was in his day.
The human eye consists of over two million working parts making it second only to the brain in complexity (1). The retina covers less than a square inch, and contains 137 million light-sensitive receptor cells. The retina possesses 7 million cones, which provide color information and sharpness of images, and 120 million rods which are extremely sensitive detectors of white light (2). There are between seven to ten-million shades of color the human eye can detect (3). The rod can detect a single photon. Any man-made detector would need to be cooled and isolated from noise to behave the same way (4). On average, about a quarter of a billion photons enter our eyes each second (5). For visible light, the energy carried by a single photon would be around a tiny 4 x 10-19 Joules; this energy is just sufficient to excite a single molecule in a photoreceptor cell of an eye (6). The eye is so sensitive that it can, under normal circumstances, detect a candle 1.6 miles away (7), But if you’re sitting on a mountain top on a clear, moonless night you can see a match struck 50 miles away (8). It only takes a few trillionths of a second, (picoseconds), for the retina to absorb a photon in the visible range of the spectrum (9). The inverted retina, far from being badly designed, is a design feature, not a design constraint. Müller cells in the ‘backwards’ retina span the thickness of the retina and act as living fiber optic cables to shepherd photons through to separate receivers, much like coins through a change sorting machine (10). The eye is infinitely more complex than any man-made camera (11). The eye can handle between 500,000 and 1.5 million messages simultaneously, and gathers 80% of all the knowledge absorbed by the brain (12). The brain receives millions of simultaneous reports from the eyes. When its designated wavelength of light is present, each rod or cone triggers an electrical response to the brain, which then absorbs a composite set of yes-or-no messages from all the rods and cones (13). There is a biological computer in the retina which compresses, and enhances the edges, of the information from all those millions of light sensitive cells before sending it to the visual cortex where the complex stream of information is then decompressed (14). This data compression process has been referred to as “the best compression algorithm around,” (15 & 15a). While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real-time performance goes unchallenged. To actually simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second (16). (of note: the preceding comparison was made in 1985 when Cray supercomputers ruled the supercomputing world). In an average day, the eye moves about 100,000 times, and our mind seems to prepare for our eye movements before they occur (17). In terms of strength and endurance, eyes muscles are simply amazing. You’d have to walk 50 miles to give your legs the same workout as the muscles in one of your eyes get in a day (18). The brain exploits a feedback system which produces phenomenally precise eye movements (19). The human is the only species known to shed tears when they are sad (20). Tears are not just saline. Tears have a similar structure to saliva and contain enzymes, lipids, metabolites and electrolytes (21). And, tears contain a potent microbe-killer (lysozyme) which guards the eyes against bacterial infection (22). The average eye blinks one to two times each minute for infants and ten times faster for adults. This blinking adds up to nearly 500 million blinks over an average lifetime (23). https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/from-philip-cunningham-the-human-eye-like-the-human-brain-is-a-wonder/ The Human Brain Is 'Beyond Belief' by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * - 2017 Excerpt: The human brain,, is an engineering marvel that evokes comments from researchers like “beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief”1 and “a world we had never imagined.”2,,, Perfect Optimization The scientists found that at multiple hierarchical levels in the whole brain, nerve cell clusters (ganglion), and even at the individual cell level, the positioning of neural units achieved a goal that human engineers strive for but find difficult to achieve—the perfect minimizing of connection costs among all the system’s components.,,, Vast Computational Power Researchers discovered that a single synapse is like a computer’s microprocessor containing both memory-storage and information-processing features.,,, Just one synapse alone can contain about 1,000 molecular-scale microprocessor units acting in a quantum computing environment. An average healthy human brain contains some 200 billion nerve cells connected to one another through hundreds of trillions of synapses. To put this in perspective, one of the researchers revealed that the study’s results showed a single human brain has more information processing units than all the computers, routers, and Internet connections on Earth.1,,, Phenomenal Processing Speed the processing speed of the brain had been greatly underrated. In a new research study, scientists found the brain is 10 times more active than previously believed.6,7,,, The large number of dendritic spikes also means the brain has more than 100 times the computational capabilities than was previously believed.,,, Petabyte-Level Memory Capacity Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.9,,, Optimal Energy Efficiency Stanford scientist who is helping develop computer brains for robots calculated that a computer processor functioning with the computational capacity of the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate properly. This is comparable to the output of a small hydroelectric power plant. As amazing as it may seem, the human brain requires only about 10 watts to function.11 ,,, Multidimensional Processing It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates.13 He also said: We found a world that we had never imagined. There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.13,,, Biophoton Brain Communication Neurons contain many light-sensitive molecules such as porphyrin rings, flavinic, pyridinic rings, lipid chromophores, and aromatic amino acids. Even the mitochondria machines that produce energy inside cells contain several different light-responsive molecules called chromophores. This research suggests that light channeled by filamentous cellular structures called microtubules plays an important role in helping to coordinate activities in different regions of the brain.,,, https://www.icr.org/article/10186
Seversky, to be blunt, for you to try to claim that the eye and brain can possibly be the result of accidental, blind chance, processes is, in effect, for you to admit that you have essentially lost your mind.
"It is not enough to say that design is a more likely scenario to explain a world full of well-designed things. It strikes me as urgent to insist that you not allow your mind to surrender the absolute clarity that all complex and magnificent things were made that way. Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident… you have essentially “lost your mind.” - Jay Homnick https://evolutionnews.org/2015/11/it_really_isnt/
Verse:
Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
bornagain77
January 19, 2022
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In other words, no one has any idea why we weren't designed with better eyes as well as better brainsSeversky
January 19, 2022
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I don’t see the problem with giving us better eyes as well as better brains
One of the more stupider remarks ever on this site especially since it’s been explained several times recently. Here for example: https://uncommondescent.com/darwinism/is-darwinism-an-empty-theory/#comment-745010 And again on same thread https://uncommondescent.com/darwinism/is-darwinism-an-empty-theory/#comment-745118 If anyone disagrees, explain why.jerry
January 19, 2022
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Seversky I don’t see the problem with giving us better eyes as well as better brains.
That's because you created nothing in your life and have no ideea what the main implications are.Lieutenant Commander Data
January 19, 2022
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I don't see the problem with giving us better eyes as well as better brains.Seversky
January 19, 2022
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ET LoL! @ seversky! We have bigger and better brains.
:) As for the brain, please don't speak on behalf of Seversky.Lieutenant Commander Data
January 19, 2022
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LoL! @ seversky! We have bigger and better brains. We made flashlights, night-vision and binoculars.ET
January 19, 2022
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Owls can also see way better in the dark than we can. How come The Designer gave them better eyes than ours?Seversky
January 19, 2022
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