Their swirling, clustering behavior may someday inform the design of self-assembling robotic swarms. A starfish embryo, in its earliest stages, before it sprouts its distinctive tentacles, looks like a small bead and spins in the water like a miniature ball bearing Now, MIT researchers have disc
MIT scientists have observed that when multiple starfish embryos spin up to the surface, they gravitate to each other and spontaneously assemble into an organized, crystal-like structure.
Beyond starfish, she says, this self-assembling, rippling crystal assemblage could be applied as a design principle, for example in building robot swarms that move and function collectively. elastic starfish MIT scientists have found that starfish embryos spontaneously swim together at the surface to form large crystal-like structures that collectively ripple and rotate for relatively long periods of time before dissolving as embryos mature. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
“There are thousands of embryos in a dish, and they start forming this crystal structure that can grow very large,” Fakhri says. “We call it a crystal because each embryo is surrounded by six neighboring embryos in a hexagon that is repeated across the entire structure, very similar to the crystal structure inTo understand what might be triggering embryos to assemble like crystals, the researchers first studied a single embryo’s flow field, or the way in which water flows around the embryo.
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