Insect-inspired microfluidics could help Ant-Man and the Wasp breathe

Enlarge / Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), and Hope van Dyne, aka the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), would need 100 times more oxygen than usual at smaller scales. (credit: Marvel Studios)

The ability to rapidly shrink down to bug size (and beyond) gives Ant-Man and the Wasp tremendous advantages. But it also comes with some scale-related drawbacks, most notably, more difficulty breathing. Trick out their suits with insect-inspired microscale air pumps, compressors, and molecule filters, combined with the fictional "Pym particle" technology, et voila! Problem solved.

Anne Staples, a bioengineer at Virginia Tech, and her graduate student Max Mikel-Stites first outlined the respiratory difficulties Ant-Man and the Wasp would likely face while insect-sized in a paper published this summer in the fledgling journal Superhero Science and Technology. (Can I just say how delighted I am that this journal exists?) The group researches respiration at the microscale, using insects as models. They described their work at a meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mikel-Stites, a fan of the Marvel cinematic universe, was stoked for Ant-Man and the Wasp's release. So one day in the lab last spring, the conversation naturally turned to how difficult it would be for the superheroes to breathe when insect-sized. "Applying that perspective to Ant-Man and the Wasp seemed like a straightforward thing to do," says Mikel-Stites, who admits to being a bit nitpicky when it comes to science in the movies. And he couldn't stop thinking about the breathing problems that our superheroes would inevitably face.

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