Stuck in Philadelphia on a stop over while they change a wheel on the aircraft.
America
I’m gone to America to talk about science for a week.
QMUL Canalside
Some recent photographs from the Regent’s Canal as it passes though the QMUL campus.
There were several of these grasshoppers chirping away, trying to find a mate. They were very approachable, not vanishing just as the shutter clicks. Common species, both male and female have short front wings and no hind wings.
Too Hardcore
I caught this Rosemary Beetle early today with the intention of CT scanning it for #CTguess & #xraystuffinmylab on Twitter, also because I’m genuinely interested in these beetles.
Consulting the literature, it seemed that nitrogen asphixiation & several hours in a freezer should painlessly euthanise the beetle, leaving it in good condition for scanning.
This little fellow, survived in 100% nitrogen for more than four hours at -10 C. It was still crawling around when I fished its testube from the freezer to scan it.
You’ve got to respect tenacity like that, so I let the beetle go free again. Too hardcore to kill.
Weather
I’ve been playing around with a homebrew weather station again, I dusted off the code I’d had running on a spare Raspberry Pi and added a few features to it. It’s now logging temperature, humidity and air pressure. I plan to add some more external sensors as soon as the parts arrive from eBay.
The graphs below are live data (for as long as I keep the station running)
The code will be on github shortly.