WMS Science Teachers

Snakes actively adjust their friction, Marvi explained, by modifying the relative angle between their scales and the surface, to adjust the levels of friction according to their needs. Marvi and his colleagues adopted these principles to create Scalybot, an artificial robot designed to climb inclined planes. Scalybot contains scale-like teeth along the bottom of its body, and these teeth can raise or lower depending on what it needs to do to navigate the environment.

In the real world of scientific investigation, she said, scientists usually rely on a model-based process rather than a hypothesis-driven one. They formulate models based on what they know from previous research and then derive testable hypotheses from those models. Data from experiments don’t validate or invalidate hypotheses as much as they feed back into the models to generate better research questions.