Entries Tagged "squid"

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Friday Squid Blogging: Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device (SQUID)

New security device:

But what if an officer could lay down a road trap in seconds, then activate it from a nearby hiding place? What if—like sea monsters of ancient lore—the trap could reach up from below to ensnare anything from a MINI Cooper to a Ford Expedition? What if this trap were as small as a spare tire, as light as a tire jack, and cost under a grand?

Thanks to imaginative design and engineering funded by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), such a trap may be stopping brigands by 2010. It’s called the Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device, or SQUID. When closed, the current prototype resembles a cheese wheel full of holes. When open (deployed), it becomes a mass of tentacles entangling the axles. By stopping the axles instead of the wheels, SQUID may change how fleeing drivers are, quite literally, caught.

Of course, there’s a lot separating a cool idea from reality. But it is a cool idea.

Posted on January 30, 2009 at 4:34 PM • View Comments

Friday Squid Blogging: Bizarre Squid Reproductive Habits

Lots of them:

Hoving investigated the reproductive techniques of no fewer than ten different squids and related cuttlefish—from the twelve-metre long giant squid to a mini-squid of no more than twenty-five millimetres in length. Along the way he made a number of remarkable discoveries. Hoving: “Reproduction is no fun if you’re a squid. With one species, the Taningia danae, I discovered that the males give the females cuts of at least 5 centimetres deep in their necks with their beaks or hooks—they don’t have suction pads. They then insert their packets of sperm, also called spermatophores, into the cuts.”

Posted on January 9, 2009 at 4:06 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.