Explosions power a surprising amount of the world. Your car engine is nothing more than a method of harnessing explosions, for example. But exploding the humble fart is not currently something we use for any sort of serious energy production.
Making robots hop like a jumping bean, though? Hell yeah!
Researchers at Harvard University have built a robot out of silicon with three arms. In those arms are hollow tubes. Those tubes are filled with a mixture of oxygen and methane. And then they’re detonated. Here are the glorious results:
To be fair, powering your robot with exploding farts is actually a pretty effective method for getting it to jump. In fact, it’s so effective that the research team isn’t sure how far it can actually leap, because the tubes to provide the exploding gases and the safety chamber seriously restrict its ability to leap.
Yes, there is profound, profound power in farts that science has just now realized. We look forward to more fart powered robots in the future.