News feeds buzzed earlier this week with reports about Austin Whitney, a young man who, despite being paralyzed from the waist down, took seven steps across the stage to receive his diploma at UC Berkeley. Whitney made his historic walk with the help of a robotic exosksleton that was designed by researchers at the university. Whitney is the first human to have tested this one.
I found it somewhat interesting that many of the reporters writing the stories about Whitney wrote about the "exoskeleton," placing quotation marks around the term as if it were a foreign word or unknown jargon.
Really? They assumed most people don't know what an exoskeleton is? Odd. Most of the children I teach from second grade on forward know what one is. Even some of the first-graders have even heard the term by the end of the school year.
An exoskeleton is a skeleton that is outside the body (hence, "exo"). It is what insects and arachnids (spiders) have, and it was a miracle even before Whitney used a human-created one to walk.
Most everyone knows that snakes shed their skins as they grow. But exoskeletons are discarded among insects and arachnids too. For example, a dragonfly larva lives under water for about two years before emerging as the airborne form with which we are all familiar. During its larval stage, the dragonfly will shed its exoskeleton more than a dozen times as it grows. When it finally does emerge from the water, creeping up a cattail leaf or bulrush, the larva will shed the exoskeleton once more to reveal the winged dragonfly.
Cool, eh? Another exoskeleton, with which urban naturalists may be more familiar, is that of the spider. Remember the last spider you saw that was all curled up and dead? Chances are, it wasn't a dead spider but was the exoskeleton of a live spider that is now ... bigger.
Sleep well.
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