The Crystal That Crawls by Rebuilding Itself
Transcript
You're watching real microscope footage, sped up a hundred times.
It's a light-sensitive organic crystal called D M A B.
Ultraviolet and blue light shine on it from different directions.
The light changes the shape of its molecules.
At the back, solid turns to liquid. At the front, liquid forms new crystal.
One edge retreats. The other grows. So the crystal changes position without rolling.
It's slow: about fifteen micrometres in ten minutes in this experiment.
No legs. No motor. Just a crystal rebuilding its way forward.
Attribution
Research and real microscopy: Uchida, Azumi & Norikane, Nature Communications (2015), doi:10.1038/ncomms8310, Supplementary Movies 1 and 3, CC BY 4.0; footage cropped and annotated, original nominal 100x time-lapse speed retained. Original 3D teaching animation, graphics and edit: Ask Pandi; narration: ElevenLabs, George. The model illustrates the proposed mechanism, exaggerates thickness and motion, and is not molecular simulation. Licence/source notices: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ [1]
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