By Sophia Byl
Attention all U.S. citizens: a grave emergency has descended upon our country. The danger noodles have learned to fly. Yes, the snakes are taking to the sky. Federal agencies recommend you and your families take cover indoors, before the clouds and sun are covered up by the sheer number of airborne slithering menaces. Keep small pets, especially rodents, away from all windows and avoid going outdoors unless you ABSOLUTELY MUST. If a flying snake enters your home, call the National Flying Snake Hotline and take immediate cover. This is not a drill.
… is what we would be saying if flying snakes truly were a threat to human safety. Yes, they are real (albeit they glide more than they do fly), and their bite is venomous, but you’re going to be fine. The venom is only truly lethal to very small animals, the kind of animals the snake considers prey.
Since this coming Lunar New Year features the snake as its zodiac animal, it would only be appropriate to discuss their unique abilities, while also dispelling some of the stigma surrounding them. Most snakes are quite harmless to people, and the ones that are venomous only attack humans when cornered or otherwise threatened. Plus, said venomous snakes are being heavily researched in oncology labs: the ability of the poison to turn tissue into jelly reveals a promising future for cancer cures.
The flying snake’s venom, as we learned earlier, isn’t potent enough to be of much use to cancer research. However, its gliding ability has caught the attention of physicists at research colleges like Virginia Tech and the University of Chicago. Even the US Department of Defense has shown interest in flying snakes, in hope that it will help them develop specialized robots that can glide silently and quickly through the air.
So how exactly does the snake fly around like some majestic serpentine dragon? Well, it essentially turns itself into a wing. By flattening its body and spreading out its ribs, the snake goes from a not-so-aerodynamic noodle shape to a flat, slithering form: one with just enough surface area to combat gravity and glide through the air. This shape-changing trait renders the flying snake as one of the better gliders in the animal kingdom, surpassing the likes of flying squirrels and sugar gliders ( who only use a small flap of skin to stay airborne, rather than their whole bodies.) The snakes can even turn in midair, using their tails as a rudder of sorts.
John Socha, a bioengineering professor at Virginia Tech, is one of the leading scientists on flying snake ballistics (spectacular job description right there). His lab has been conducting research with both live and model snakes, in order to examine what kinds of aerodynamics secrets we can borrow from them. Socha explains that what sets the snakes apart in terms of gliding ability is how they “become one long wing.” When he placed a model snake into a water tank to examine how the liquid flowed around the model, he was surprised to find just how much lift the shape generated. The snake’s unique body shape – Socha compared it to looking like a UFO – is ultimately what makes it such a good glider.
Currently, Socha’s research is being funded by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency under the US Department of Defense. The DOD hopes that the danger noodles’ sick ballistics skills will help in improving existing military ballistics techniques. Unfortunately, a giant snake-shaped airplane isn’t exactly feasible. Flying snakes travel at just the right speed for their UFO shape to be useful, and it would be, in Socha’s words, a “terrible idea” to scale that up to a plane zooming by at the speed of sound.
At least we’re learning from the snakes, instead of cowering in fear at the thought of their very existence.
