PAGE: 1 PAGE: 2 Table of Contents LEXILE® MEASURE 3 A Slick Little Robot 930L 5 Down a Wombat Hole 800L 7 Drilling in the Ocean Floor 980L 9 Gerbils Morphing 730L 11 How the Weaverbird Built His Nest 770L 13 Let Curiosity Lead You 900L 14 New Windows on Our Minds 980L 16 Rattlesnake Crossing 660L 18 Stroking Molecules 960L 20 How the Brain Fools the Eye 830L 22 Thinking Like Edison 790L 23 This Keyboard Fits like a Glove 830L ©Highlights for Children, Inc. This item is permitted to be used by a teacher or educator free of charge for classroom use by printing or photocopying one copy for each student in the class. Highlights® Fun with a Purpose® ISBN 978-1-62091-230-0 PAGE: 28 A SLICK LITTLE By Harry T. Roman ROBOT OTIS is a mobile robot, and I must be cleaned and checked helped design it. regularly. The usual way of Actually, OTIS is just one of cleaning and inspecting the tanks about twenty robots I helped creates problems. Draining the oil create. CECIL crawls inside the from the tanks is messy. Also, the dangerous reactor areas of nuclear people who climb inside the tanks power plants and submarines. to inspect them are in danger, RoBall can walk inside steel pipes even though they use special suits and inspect them with a tiny and breathing equipment. These camera. And SURBOT climbs inspectors sometimes must spend stairs, guards high-security areas, weeks doing the hot, boring work. and lifts heavy objects. OTIS does the job in a couple of But OTIS is my favorite. It was days, saving time and money. The the first robot I helped design, and oil tanks need to be drained only now it is used all over the world. when OTIS finds a spot that has OTIS is short for Oil Tank to be fixed. Inspection System. It is used to inspect oil tanks at refineries, OTIS’s Job Top of page: Some of the tanks power plants, and seaports. Those When we designed OTIS, our that OTIS inspects are huge. large, tuna-can-shaped tanks hold challenge was to create a robot Above: The four-wheeled robot is fuel oil for trucks, homes, and that could clean the oil and lowered into an oil tank. factories. The tanks are often inspect the steel floor of the tank forty to one hundred feet across while all of the oil was still in the and fifty feet high. Five to eight tank! No one had ever done that would harm the robot and possibly medium-sized houses could fit into before. Here is how we did it. leak inside and destroy delicate one of these tanks. Our first problem was to choose electronic equipment. We used a To make sure oil doesn’t leak the right material for OTIS’s body. strong plastic. Rubber seals into the environment, the tanks Otherwise, the oil in the tank between body parts prevented the ©Highlights for Children, Inc. This item is permitted to be used by a teacher or educator free of charge for classroom use by printing or photocopying one copy for each student in the class. Highlights® Fun with a Purpose® Photos courtesy of Eugene Silverman, ARD Environmental, Inc., ISBN 978-1-62091-136-5 Laurel, MD PAGE: 29 oil from leaking into OTIS, even cables to do the job, we decided to vacuum hose to the top of the oil at high pressures. The pressure at lower the robot in through the tank, where a special filter the bottom of an oil tank is opening at the top of the tank. We removes the dirt. The clean oil similar to being under tons of used magnetic wheels to attach then flows back into the tank water. OTIS to the metal tank floor. through another hose. Next, we made an important Having the robot crawling on the decision about how OTIS would floor gave us a way to track where The Robot’s Brain move around inside the tank. OTIS was at any time. Maybe the hardest part to There were two choices: Let the design was OTIS’s “brain.” We robot swim through the oil or roll Seeing Through Oil had to solve the problem of how along the bottom of the tank. Next we gave our robot special OTIS could check the metal floor Since OTIS would need to bring camera eyes so we could see the of a tank for cracks, holes, or other vacuum hoses and electrical tank floor. We designed lights problems. that would allow OTIS to “see” We used high-pitched sound through the yellow-orange color of waves called ultrasonics. We Below: A worker hooks up OTIS’s the oil. These eyes show us the cannot hear these sound waves. hoses before the big job begins. floor plus any obstacles that OTIS They are beyond the range of Bottom of page: OTIS crawls may have to avoid, such as devices human ears. along, inspecting the floor of an that warm the oil in cold weather. Like a bat hunting for insects, oil tank. In OTIS’s belly, OTIS uses ultrasonics to read between his wheels, we the surface of the metal. Common placed a small but high- bats of North America hunt by powered vacuum system. sending out squeaks, which This device sucks up bounce off objects and return to dirty oil that has sunk to the bat. A bat can tell where an the bottom of the tank. insect is by how long it takes The dirty oil goes up one sound waves to bounce off that insect and enter the bat’s ears. In a similar way, OTIS gets OTIS works information about the floor of the under oil tank by sending down sounds that bounce off the floor back to pressure. the robot. OTIS is constantly sending information by sound so that the person operating the robot can tell where it is and what it’s doing. OTIS’s location is shown on a screen. As OTIS gathers infor- mation about the floor of the tank, that information also shows on the screen. The good areas of the floor appear as green, and the bad areas are shown in red. Whenever I see those large tanks I think of OTIS. I wonder where he is, helping to keep the environment clean and humans safe from dangerous work. Now there are more robots like OTIS, doing the same kind of work. I wonder what their names are! PAGE: 16 Down a Wombat Hole By Douglas McInnis For fun, American scientist Dr. Faith Walker crawls into wombat holes. Although she would love to meet a wombat, she knows their tunnels are not good meeting Dr. Walker stretches double-sided sticky tape across the tunnel entrance to collect wombat hair samples and to see who’s home. places. Wombats look like teddy bears but are built like 50-pound bulldozers. They run away when they see a human. Dr. Walker could get crushed if a wombat tried to rush past her in a tunnel. Dr. Walker is studying southern hairy-nosed wombats, which live in remote areas of South Australia. She camps near the wombat tunnels and stays several months. Insects and heat make camp life uncomfortable. Dr. Walker wears a net over her head so bugs will not bite her. The dusty holes smell musky, but she cools down by crawling inside. “It feels like air conditioning,” she says. Not much is known about wombats, so Dr. Walker is trying to learn more. “Trapping wombats is very stressful for them,” Dr. Walker says. Instead of handling them, she studies their hairs. In her field work, Dr. Walker To do this, Dr. Walker stretches sticky never captures wombats. That tape across a tunnel entrance. The tape kind of contact is stressful for catches a few hairs when a wombat them. She can hold Wanda because this orphaned baby is brushes it. She then collects the hair from a wildlife sanctuary. samples to study them. Photos by 16: (top) Dr. Faith M. Walker, (bottom) S. Grover/B. Cleaver; 17: Dr. Faith M. Walker PAGE: 17 In a laboratory, she studies the tiny Suddenly she recognized the sound. details of the hair. Using these details, Snoring! Sleeping wombats snore, just she can tell which wombat the hair like people. came from. So each hair is like a There are many questions Dr. Walker wombat nametag. The hairs tell Dr. wants to answer. How do wombat Walker how many wombats live in each families work? How well do they get tunnel and whether they are related to along? After sleeping all day, where do one another. wombats go at night? The sticky tape also tells Dr. Walker Long drives, hard camp life, hot if a wombat is home. Before she goes weather, and bothersome bugs are all into a tunnel, Dr. Walker checks the worth it to Dr. Walker. Field research is tape. If there is hair on it, much more than a chance to she knows the wombats are Dr. Walker explore wombat tunnels. It’s also inside. Then she stays out. studies the best way to learn about When the wombats are wombats in wombats. gone, Dr. Walker crawls Australia. into their holes. The tunnels are too narrow for her to go far. “I’ve gotten as far as twenty feet,” Dr. Walker says. One time a wombat charged up a tunnel toward Dr. Walker. The entrance tape had not caught any hair, so she did not know the wombat was still inside.