The Waggle Dance Motion of Honeybees
How can honeybees communicate the locations of new food sources? Austrian biologist, Karl Von Frisch, devised an experiment to find out! By pairing the direction of the sun with the flow of gravity, honeybees are able to explain the distant locations of food by dancing. “The Waggle Dance of the Honeybee” details the design of Von Frisch’s famous experiment and explains the precise grammar of the honeybees dance language with high quality visualizations.
This video is a design documentary, developed by scientists at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing in order to better understand and share with others, the complex behaviors that can arise in social insects. Their goal at the Multi-Agent Robotics and Systems (MARS) Laboratory is to harness new computer vision techniques to accelerate biologists’ research in animal behavior. This behavioral research is then used, in turn, to design better systems of autonomous robots.
The Foraminifera (hole bearers), or forams for short, are a large group of amoeboid protists which are among the commonest plankton species. They have reticulating pseudopods, fine strands of cytoplasm that branch and merge to form a dynamic net. They typically produce a test, or shell, which can have either one or multiple chambers, some becoming quite elaborate in structure. These shells are made of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) or agglutinated sediment particles. About 275,000 species are recognized, both living and fossil. They are usually less than 1 mm in size, but some are much larger, and the largest species reaching up to 20 cm.
Chemical analysis of fossilized foraminifera, shell-building one-celled creatures, helps climate researchers determine oceanic temperatures during a mini-ice age hundreds of years ago. Globigerinoides sacculifer (top left) and Globigerinoides ruber white (bottom right) are planktonic organisms that spend their lives floating near the surface but fall like sand grains to the bottom of the ocean when they die. Uvigerina peregrina (top right) and Cibicides wuellerstorfi (bottom left) are benthonic organisms that live and die on or in sediments on the seafloor.
Read More: The Next Ice Age, Discover Magazine and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Daisy Ginsberg, The Synthetic Kingdom
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a postmodern Michelangelo — equal parts designer and researcher. Her magnum opus, The Synthetic Kingdom, is a collection of prints, animations and objects that suggest how synthetic biology might add to the tree of life. Each of its sculptures represents a speculative syn-bio curiosity, from a new strain of light-emitting bacteria that evolved from a hairball found in a patient’s stomach, to bioluminescent kidney stones in bioelectronics-factory workers.
“Synthetic biology is promising to change the world, from sustainable fuel to tumour-killing bacteria,” says Ginsberg, 28. “But personally I’m sceptical about how we should use it — just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should.” She employs these fictional objects to raise questions such as “where do we draw the line?” and “what’s natural, and what’s synthetic?”
1. COLONIC ALCHEMY
Perhaps the ultimate pathology: the patient’s waste material turned to gold. It had always been thought that gold was impossible to synthesise. Genetic testing failed to reveal the origins of these prized alchemical bacteria. Previously uncelebrated, the colon is now a place of manufacture and our most precious organ.2. MATERIALS: DISPOSABLE CUP
Triggered by light, engineered bacteria secrete the fibrous protein KERATIN, producing a biodegradable material to replace petroleum-derived plastics.3. KIDNEY
Inside this resin “kidney” are large glow-in-the dark “stones”
via: Wired
The Daily Dish project by Klari Reis
“Thanks to Touba for this link. Welcome to all my new readers.
Enjoy last days of August.”
Dragon Fruit or Pitahaya
A Pitaya (pronounced /pɨˈtaɪ.ə/) or pitahaya (English pronunciation: /ˌpɪtəˈhaɪ.ə/) is the fruit of several cactus species, most importantly of the genus Hylocereus (sweet pitayas). These fruit are commonly known as dragon fruit – cf. Chinese huǒ lóng guǒ 火龍果/火龙果 “fire dragon fruit” and lóng zhū guǒ “dragon pearl fruit”, or Vietnamese thanh long (green dragon). Other vernacular names are strawberry pear or nanettikafruit.
via: Flickr
Human blood cells, SEM
Caption: Human blood cells, coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM). Seen here are platelets (small, roundish) and a neutrophil white blood cell (large, whitish).
Ovary (plants) insertion:
I) superior
II) half-inferior
III) inferior.a) androecium
g) gynoecium
p) petals
s) sepals
r) receptacle.The insertion point is where a, p, and s converge.
The fruit of wild bananas (Musa balbisiana) are riddled with large, hard seeds. Most of today’s cultivated bananas are triploid, having an extra copy of every chromosome, which results in seedless fruit. | +
Seeds of wild flowers by Ms. Yanping Wang
Beijing Planetarium
Beijing, China
Technique: Brightfield reflected light
via: BioScapes
Atlas d’embryologie (1889)
Author: Duval, Mathias Marie, 1844-1907
Subject: Embryology
Publisher: Paris, G. Masson
Language: French
found: here
Atlas d’embryologie (1889)
Author: Duval, Mathias Marie, 1844-1907
Subject: Embryology
Publisher: Paris, G. Masson
Language: French
found: here
