MANY spiders are nearly blind, but can "see" what is going on in their webs by picking up disturbances via their legs. Researchers have now made an audio-visual virtual reality take on this, converting vibrations these animals sense to sounds we can hear, giving us an idea of what it might feel like to be a spider. "The spider web can be viewed as an extension of the body of the spider, in that it lives within it, but also uses it as a sensor," says Markus Buehler at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who presented the work at a virtual meeting of the American Chemical Society.
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