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A new study conducted by an Irish scientist revealed that dandelion seeds use a form of flight that serves no purpose other than nature to disperse.
Eventually, the results of the study could be used to design small-scale drones requiring minimal or no power.
"We have found a natural solution for theft that minimizes material and energy costs and can be applied to the engineering of sustainable technologies," said Dr. Cathal Cummins, Faculty of Life Sciences. and the biological engineering of the University of Edinburgh.
This extraordinary ability is the result of the movement of air around and inside the parachute-shaped bundles of bristles located at the top of the seed filaments, called pappus.
Researchers, led by Dr. Cummins, discovered that when air was passing through the hair, it created a ring-shaped air bubble called a separate vortex ring.
The bubble is physically detached from the hair and stabilized by the air passing through it.
This increases the drag, slowing down the speed of each seed that falls to the ground and keeps it stable.
Thanks to this effect, the common weed is one of the best thieves in the world, allowing seeds to travel one kilometer or more in the wind and more than four times more efficient than conventional parachute models.
The spacing between the bristles accurately controls the flow of air through them.
The discovery was made as a result of a series of experiments by the research team, whose findings are published in the journal Nature.
This involved placing the filaments in a wind tunnel and using long exposure photographs and high speed images to capture their movements.
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