Washington
ROBERT Full doesn't like cockroaches. Probably for the same reasons as the rest of us: they're slick and they skitter, they have those shiny exoskeletons, they're practically impossible to kill.
Shudder.
Nevertheless, Mr Full has devoted countless hours to analysing cockroaches intently, trying to figure out exactly how they do what they do.
The reason Mr Full, a biomechanics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, put himself through all that was published on this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: It's a paper in which he and a colleague argue that cockroaches, with their soft bodies, resilient shells and nimble creepy-crawling, are an ideal model...