Creepy-Crawlies Use Cogs

The cogs used in hind legs of Issus coleoptratus.

To synchronise mechanical motion of their legs when jumping, chrysalises of small insects Issus coleoptratus use cogs. Thanks to such a simple mechanical device the insects reduce asynchrony of their hind leg movements down to about 30 microseconds.

What is code and does DNA have one?

A coding function maps a set of objects to a set of symbols: O → S , where S is a set of symbols (tokens); O is a set of objects. A decoding function is the inverse and maps the set of symbols back to the set of objects: S → O. Without loss of generality S can be thought of as a set of configurations of a material system. The set of coding function values is determined by the semantic cargo voluntarily attached by the decision making agent to specific configurations.