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Mragftw t1_j3svvtw wrote

Reply to comment by abrandis in Physicists have discovered that mimicking human muscles can lead to more efficiently designed electric motors for use in robots and appliances. Their bioinspired motors use up to 22% less energy, have a greater range of motion and can lift objects higher than typical electric motors. by Sariel007

I'm just trying to picture how a wheel would look evolved on a living organism... like it would require the ability to spin freely and I can't think of a single thing that can do that in nature

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abrandis t1_j3swxvn wrote

There isn't , there are some animals that can coil themselves (centipedes, caterpillars) into a shape of a wheel/circle and roll or have the wind push them, but no none in the animal kingdom. I suspect because a free rotating wheel would be disconnected from the body that grew it...

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deepdivisions t1_j3t02et wrote

I think the larger issue is that wheels don't scale well beyond flagellum type structures on a single cell; there isn't a path to scaling up to a larger wheel.

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RoHouse t1_j3zly9h wrote

Which honestly wouldn't be that big of a problem, we've seen crazier stuff in nature before. The issue is that a wheel is a bad and inefficient design for the surface of Earth, which is rough, sloped, covered with stuff, dry, sticky etc. As humans we didn't invent only wheels, we also invented roads to go along with them and leveled rock formations, hills, forests etc to build them. In a fully natural world without roads, wheels are useless.

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