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.
A delayed update
A coupe of weekends ago I visited the Mayfield Lavender open weekend with Meagen, I meant to write about it at the time, but didn’t get around to it. No problem, Diamond Geezer also visited and wrote up the visit in more detail than I’d get around to here.
While there we helped collect Rosemary Beetles from the lavender plants, we got somewhere around 100 beetles in a glass jar.
Rosemary Beetles (Chrysolina americana)
I also spotted a pair of Soldier beetles mating , and really wished I’d taken along a decent camera. It’s hard to do macro photography with a phone camera.
