"NEWSER) – We're pretty sure the ancient Greek mechanics who invented the gear weren't copying the Issus coleoptratus, but if they'd had an electron microscope, they could have. In a paper published this week in Science, a pair of biologists reveal that young specimens of these relatively common bugs have interlocking gears where their legs meet, Smithsonian Magazine reports. It's the only known instance of mechanical gears appearing in nature. “We usually think of gears as something that we see in human-designed machinery, but we’ve found that that is only because we didn’t look hard enough,” says one of the researchers."...
