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25.01.2022 It’s a blue, blue world to a bee. You probably assume that bees are attracted to brightly coloured and scented flowers, and are very attuned to the whole colour range. But no, bees, like many insects, see from approximately 300 to 650 nm. That’s in the blue to yellow range and means they can’t see the colour red. Importantly, they can also see in the ultraviolet spectrum (which humans cannot). ... Vision is important to bees, because they feed on nectar and pollen and that means they have to find flowers. Bees can use odor cues to hone in on a flower, but that only works when they’re already pretty close. Vision is essential to help the bees find flowers at a distance. While it is possible that bee vision has evolved to become attuned to flowers, it is more likely that flowers have evolved to attract insect pollinators including bees. Flowering plants rely heavily on insects to transmit pollen from one flower to another, allowing them to reproduce. As a result, many flowers have distinctive ultraviolet color patterns that are invisible to the human eye, but are incredibly eye-catching to bees. For example, these ultraviolet patterns often outline landing zones for bees, pointing them towards the part of the plant containing nectar and pollen. That’s good news for the bees, of course, but it also makes it more likely that some of the flower’s pollen will stick to a bee and be inadvertently deposited in another flower. #LabRatsScience

23.01.2022 The Mathematics of Beauty. What does the 21st letter of the ancient Greek alphabet (Phi), beauty and maths have in common? ‘Beauty’ is a relative term that varies between race, culture and across the centuries. Many studies seem to show that our perception of physical beauty could be hardwired into our brains.... It seems our attraction to another person physically may depend on their symmetry and proportions. Their faces in particular. Scientists believe we subconsciously perceive well-proportioned bodies as being more healthy. The letter Phi has become attributed to the ‘Golden Ratio’ and studies into attractiveness show that this ratio is extensive within the proportions of human faces. For example, a competition held back in 2012 demonstrated the ratio in action when Florence Colgate was awarded Britain's "Most Perfect Face of 2012". Quite a flattering accolade and this video explains why she won. The golden ratio appears in many and varied places in nature and the modern world. Yes, it’s a visually-pleasing phenomena based on Fibonacci Numbers, but apart from the underlying maths don’t get too hung up about it. #LabRatsScience

22.01.2022 Sometimes being a scientist means feeding bed bugs your own blood. Bedbugs are ancient critters with diets made up entirely of blood. Before they developed their taste for humans, they dwelled in caves and fed on bats. When our species moved into the caves, we became one of their main meal sources. Eventually we gave them a free ride to our more-modern residences. They’ve had millennia to get to know us. To become scientifically acquainted with them, we need to collect the bu...gs in the field and recolonize them in the lab. Robert Pereira at the Uni of Florida was researching tropical bedbugs (Cimex hemipterus) and this involved keeping them alive. So he had to feed them FRESH BLOOD, which involved putting their cage on his arm and letting them feed for a bit. As he says, ‘I gets uncomfortable when you have around 100 on your skin’. (Scientific understatement!!) #LabRatsScience

19.01.2022 Does Superman's Cape Slow Him Down? A new study has been conducted that will put an end to playground debates and heated arguments worldwide. It answers the question, does Superman's cape slow him down? The study was carried out as a student's final project in a low-speed aerodynamics class.... An Iron Man not Superman figurine was placed inside the university's low-speed wind tunnel to take the readings. For the experiment the student wanted to measure the forces acting upon a ‘Superman’ traveling at flight speeds of Mach 0.2 - 0.7, using Reynolds numbers (which is a value that can be used to scale models to their full-scale counterparts in flight). The student reasoned that this would be close to the speed Superman would fly, assuming he is not breaking the sound barrier. The Iron Man figurine is also streamlined enough to be used in place of a Superman figurine. A strain gauge was attached to a piece of PVC pipe and the pipe epoxied to Iron Man's groin. This way they could place Iron Man in a flying pose, ready to be tested in the wind tunnel with and without a cape. The student's experiment used Newton's 2nd law of motion F=ma (or F=d/dt(mv)) to measure the relation between drag force (from a cape) and flight velocity of an object (Superman). The control for the experiment was the figurine without a cape, and the independent variables were muslin fabric capes of different materials and sizes. The result? The heavy and bigger the cape is, the less drag force is experienced. Basically, you fly faster with capes! According to the student, ‘The cape acts like a streamlined surface that helps to delay the separation of the airflow to further downstream of the figurine, resulting in a smaller separation area and therefore a lower profile drag. The longer the cape, the further downstream the separation’. #LabRatsScience #Physics

16.01.2022 Locusts another current plague. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned that rising locust numbers in the Horn of Africa present an extremely alarming and unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods. According to the FAO, a swarm of about 40 million desert locusts can eat the same amount of food in one day as about 35,000 people. Swarms can be as large as several hundred square kilometres, with as many as 80 million adults per square kilometr...e. Locusts belong to the same order of insects as grasshoppers, katydids and crickets. Locusts are simply grasshoppers that develop gregarious behaviours and become more voracious (hungry) as a result. Grasshoppers can become gregarious and start to swarm due to an increase in chemical serotonin in their nervous system. This results in them going from individual walking grasshoppers to flying locusts. There are no clear differences between locusts and grasshoppers other than behaviour. From a nutritional point of view, grasshoppers and locusts are excellent sources of protein and other essential nutrients. When they’re swarming, they can be collected in large numbers, and relatively quickly and easily. This can even be done using hands, bags and buckets. So in earlier times eating swarming locusts used to make sense. But it’s not a good idea nowadays, as the main means of locust control is by aerial spring with pesticides instead of dying from starvation since the locusts have eaten all your food source, you may die from neurotoxic poisoning. There is some good news though a new trial has used a spray mix of linseed oil, bicarb and essential oils (orange peel, caraway & wintergreen) killed 100% of migratory locust within 24 hours. And linseed oil is cheaply available in large quantities.

14.01.2022 An AI lie detector can now tell when you're fibbing. Artificial intelligence is everywhere, but here's a use you may not have considered: lie detection. That ideaan AI fib snifferis in the news because of a border security project in Europe called iBorderCtrl that involves technology focused on 'deception detection’. It analyses the micro-expressions of travellers to figure out if the interviewee is lying.... Lie detectors (‘polygraphs’) have a long history (even way before your parents were born), and stopped being used because of their high error rate. This new one now was tested by using existing transcripts of actual court trails, as examples of either truthful or deceitful statements, and they achieved 60 to 75 percent accuracy. This is actually better than the average person (who believe ‘they can tell when someone is lying’ but, sorry, that myth has long been busted. By the way, police detectives do no better either.) One thing the system noticed? The use of pronounspeople who are lying would tend to less often use the word ‘I’ or ‘we,’ or things that refer to themselves. Instead, people who are lying would more often use ‘you,’ ‘yours,’ ‘he,’ ‘they,’ [and] ‘she.’ That’s not the only linguistic signal: someone telling a lie would use stronger words that reflect certainty. Examples of those types of words are absolutely, and very, while interestingly, people telling the truth were more likely to hedge, using words such as maybe or probably. Now there’s a topic for a science investigation

12.01.2022 May LabRats Competition. Does an iPhone contain electric motors? Explain in a couple sentences if this is true and, if so, how many there are & what exactly they do. ... As usual, this contest is for teens only (no adults), so take a pic of yourself holding up a sheet of paper with your answer (with large printing so we can read it), then include the pic as a comment to this post. The winner will be the first correct explanation & wins a $100 Coles or Amazon voucher. #LabRatsScience #Technology #LabRatsQuiz

12.01.2022 I want to clone that dog. Really? Fair enough. They’re adorable, they do adorable stuff, and you don’t want to say goodbye when they’re gone. No argument there. Understandable. In recent years, technology has given (higher-income) pet owners the ability to mean it literally about US$50,000 for dogs and US$25,000 for cats. ... It’s raised questions of whether an owner should really put their money where their mouth is. And one veterinarian, Dr. Katy Nelson, says curious owners should reconsider. The laboratory procedure involves what she called a really expensive, highly scientific puppy mill. Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should. The procedure works this way: DNA is extracted from the pet to be cloned, generally through a biopsy of tissue. This tissue is cryogenically preserved. Surrogate animals create fertilized eggs. The DNA is then erased from those eggs and the pet’s preserved DNA is inserted. Those altered eggs are then implanted back into surrogate animals, which may or may not get pregnant and carry them to term. But Nelson goes on to explain, The surrogate animals don’t appear to lead a pleasant existence, these animals are being kept against their will. They’re being kept hormonally supplemented, so that they can create these embryos at will. Those surrogate animals are also undergoing multiple pregnancies just to create one viable puppy or kitten clone and unneeded clones face an uncertain fate. In addition, the commercial labs that clone pets aren’t necessarily forthcoming about what goes on behind the scenes. #LabRats #LabRatsScience

11.01.2022 And even more bad Eddy Woo jokes. You can see Eddy's WooTube maths sessions at https://misterwootube.com

04.01.2022 Evolved for low-light hunting, cats’ eyes are proportionally enormous. Their eye size makes focusing between near and far so difficult that the muscles develop with an environmental bias. Outdoor cats tend to be farsighted, while most indoor cats are nearsighted. Because their eyes are so large, cats can’t focus on anything less than a foot in front of them but their whiskers can swing forward to feel what they can’t clearly see.

04.01.2022 Pigeon brain's global positioning system located. When winter comes along, pigeons follow the earth’s magnetic field straight to warmer climes. It’s still a mystery exactly where they keep the internal magnets that allow them to detect these fields, but we now know how their brains use these magnetic fields to navigate. The new findings may one day lead to technology to restore a sense of direction in people with dementia. Researchers at Baylor College in Houston, Texas, coll...ected seven homing pigeons and inserted electrodes into their brains to record the activity of individual neurons. They then placed the birds inside an artificial magnetic field and, as the researchers adjusted the intensity and angle of the field, they monitored how the pigeons’ brain activity changed. In one area of the brainstem, 53 neurons were particularly active. These cells probably link to the brain’s internal map, acting as a biological GPS. The findings also suggest that the magnets are located in the ear, rather than in the eye or beak. What was surprising was that the pigeons were also able to tell when the researchers flipped the magnetic field from North to South. This means that birds migrating from the equator towards higher latitudes can rely on their magnetic sense alone to ensure they are not inadvertently flying in the wrong direction. #LabRatsScience

03.01.2022 World's most powerful telescope takes us to the edge of a black hole. On a desert mountain in Chile, a mega telescope is peering over the event horizon of a black hole the aim is to test Einstein's theories to the limit. Four hulking figures dominate the summit of Cerro Paranal, a rust-red mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Their home is among the most inhospitable places on Earth a desolate, dusty terrain reminiscent of the surface of Mars. As night falls, the giants sl...owly rotate and stir into life. Doors slide open, and within the structures vast mirrors begin to capture light from distant corners of the universe. Together they make up the world’s most powerful optical telescope: the ESO’s Very Large Telescope array, with four 8.2 metre mirrors which can be combined to form what is in essence a 200 metre mirror. This unrivalled light-gathering apparatus can distinguish two car headlights at the distance of the moon. In the last 12 months the VLT has captured the first image of a planet forming in the dusty disc around a young star, measured the chemical composition of an asteroid in the frigid outer solar system, observed the aftermath of a collision between two neutron stars and analysed the atmospheres of the seven Earth-sized worlds around the TRAPPIST-1 star, several of which appear to be rich in water. But its most impressive recent observation is of a star, known as S2, sailing perilously close to Sagittarius A, which is a monster black hole 4 billion times the mass of the sun, sitting at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have been watching S2 since the early 1990s, knowing that its elliptical orbit would eventually take it close enough to Sagittarius A to enable the most stringent tests ever of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. And the VLT has now shown that the black hole’s immense gravitational field stretched the star’s light by almost precisely the amount that general relativity predicts. Yea, another win for Albert!

03.01.2022 The black snake experiment. The black fire snake is an impressive experiment that is also known as the sugar snake. In order to do the experiment, you will need sugar, baking soda, sand, lighter fluid, and a lighter. Put some baking soda on top of a bowl of sand that has been doused in lighter fluid. Once lit, the baking soda makes carbon dioxide gas. The pressure from this gas pushes the carbonate from the burning sugar out, producing the mesmerizing snake-like effect.... SAFETY WARNING: If you do try this experiment at home, make sure not to touch the "snake" until it has completely cooled down, also keep away while the reaction is occurring.