Midget Mariner

Ettore Bugatti is believed to have developed a 16 cylinder racing car in 1928 by gearing 2 straight-eight engines side-by-side to a single output shaft. This followed the success in 1916 of Hispano Suiza and Bugatti-King aero engines, with 2 crankshafts geared to a central propellor-shaft through which a machine gun could fire without hitting the propellor. In each case, 2 power sources jointly drive one output.

This may be a clever idea but guys, Someone beat you to it without filing for a patent - who was that?

Using cryo-electron tomography (eh?), microbiologists have recently discovered that a marine bacteria known as MO-1 is powered by, not 2, but 7 flagella (whip propellors) that propel the bacterium at a speed of 10 body lengths per second. Scaled up, just how fast is that? A racing boat would be moving at about 300 kilometres per hour - underwater!

How is it possible for 7 whip propellors with independant power plants to safely operate side-by-side in synchrony?

This schematic model demonstrates how the 7 flagella rotate within a glycoprotein sheath, being surrounded by 24 counter-rotating fibrils in an hexagonal array, so that each flagella is supported by 6 fibrils. Not only does this allow for unbelievable engine speeds but the whole entity is ‘magnetotactic’, causing the bacterium to swim in a helical trajectory towards magnetic north!

Besides the brilliant Designer-Engineer we must give due credit to: Juanfan Ruan, Kato Takayuki, Namba Keiichi, and Long-Fei Wu engaged at Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University and the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Thanks guys.

Acknowledgements: 
evolutionnews.org 
ncbi.nim.nih.gov
pnas.org 
osaka-u.ac.jp 
Jonathon Sarfati / creation.com 
Image credits: Bugatti / flickr.com  
schematic / onlinelibrary.wiley.com