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Forensic Science
16 Jun 2007
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18th Jun 2006

Social Insects and Locust-Inspired Car Safety


Helen Scales

Chris Smith
Locust

Scratching the itch of curiosity this week is Dr William Foster from Cambridge University, who will be talking about the evolution of social insects and his quest for social beetles in Thailand; Dr Claire Rind from the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne flies in the face of current car safety technologies by using knowledge of collision avoidance in locusts; the Conservation Director of Buglife Matt Shardlow will discuss how man-made wastelands can be a haven for rare invertebrates; and Derek Thorne joins Dr Ed Turner in the garden to discover how to make pitfall traps.

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News

 

To Biodegrade, Or 'rot' To Biodegrade?

Researcher Adam Gusse and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin have found a fungus capable of rotting the previously un-rottable - compounds called phenolic resins (PRs), the plastics used in the trims on car bodies, air filter housings and other heav...

 

Simply Hair-raising

A study amongst Welsh school children, published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, has found that four out of five headlice are now resistant to treatments, such as permethrin and the organophosate malathion, which are traditionally used to erad...



Kitchen Science

 

Catching Insects with Pitfall Traps

Set a pitfall trap for some of the wild animals in your garden, using just an old plastic cup, and investigate the fascinating world of bugs.


Questions

 

There's a myth (or is it truth) that urine from a human can negate a jellyfish sting. Is that an urban legend?


 

On average, how many flies do we accidentally eat every single day?


 

Why are insects, which have composite eyes, not blinded by the sun? Apparently they have no eyelids that they can shut, and my friend Wendolin blinded some ants with a laser pen and it appeared they were quite irritated by that.


 

It's well known in the USA that bees are dying. This is having profound effects on certain types of agriculture. Why are these bees dying, are they dying elsewhere and is there any way to stop it?


 

I found a couple of beetles over an inch long and the shell looked like a withered acorn. The wing span was nearly two inches. The antennae looked like they had a pair of false eyelashes on the end.


 

I saw a bunch of ants that were crowding around some food crumbs on the pavement. Do ants sleep? They seem to be running around all the time. Do they have some sort of shift schedule that they follow?


 

I work in a bakery and years ago we used to get a lot of cockroaches. We used to stack the bread tins inside one another. There was hardly any gap but they used to get inside. How did they manage that?


 

My mother left the lid off a jar of honey in a food cupboard. We'd never seen any ants there before, but they'd managed to form a line to the food cupboard from the back door over night. They'd found the jar honey. How do they do that? Is it some form of radar? They also seemed very small ants. Are there different species of ants?





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