Japanese Knotweed in turn was introduced by the Victorians more than a hundred years ago into Britain. Meanwhile, the weed is a major pest that costs taxpayers 1.6 billion pounds a year to combat. The plant has a growth rate of 3ft per month and sends its roots down 6ft. Removing the pest means removing every particle of the roots as well, as it is able to reform from only particles of its roots. The weed is able to grow through concrete and asphalt and thereby damages buildings, roads, dams and other manmade structures.

Image source

Japanese Knotweed has several scientific names, it is known as Fallopia japonica, Polygonum cuspidatum, and Reynoutria japonica.

Now the eminently gifted government of Britain has declared the Japanese psyllid Aphalara itadori which feeds on the sap of the knotweed to be no threat to other wildlife. If the government says so, I am sure the psyllid will do exactly as told. To back up their statement, ministers have cited a research by the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International in Oxfordshire. The scientists made an exhaustive trial run on 90 (sic) native British plants with the psyllid to prove that it will not attack anything but the Japanese Knotweed.

Image source

Plants For A Future lists 7,000 edible, medicinal, and other useful plants alone on its webpage. Add to this some other plants, and the research on 90 plants by the institute mentioned becomes really impressive. There is no mention either of any tests having been made on birds or any other small predators that might feel inclined to take a nibble of psyllids. There is nothing like a well founded and exhaustive research by scientists to make you believe in a government statement.

For better or worse, licence has been granted to introduce and set free the Asian bug in Britain. With all probability, it will be another success story, the question is just for whom.

To cap it all up, the flunkies at the Daily Mail had the most amusing capture: “The psyllid dies out after destroying knotweed.” Quite so, dear David Derbyshire, that is why knotweed and psyllid are to be found well and alive in Japan to this day.

Image from Wikipedia

There are over 800 species of tarantula spiders in the world. Many are mild-mannered creatures and some are even kept as pets! Others, like the Goliath Bird Eating Spider, can be very aggressive. It’s the largest spider in the world (about the size of a dinner plate!) and can make a hissing sound to scare off predators. Its bite is painful and it can throw off barbed hairs from its back, which can irritate our skin.

RED-BACK

Image from Wikipedia

These guys are common in Australia and they hang out in dry places like garden sheds and empty trash cans. Funny enough, red-backs don’t always have a red strip and only the female’s bite is harmful. It can cause headache, vomiting, stomach pain and even paralysis (loss of muscle movement).

WHITE-TAILED

Image from Wikipedia

This fella’s bite can cause a burning pain and make you sick. In rare cases, it’s been suspected of causing the skin to break down iin a similar way to gangrene. However, it hasn’t been proven that the spider’s venom is responsible. Unfortunately, there’s no test to detect whether someone’s been bitten and there’s no antivenom either. It’s just as well they like to eat other spiders and not us!

FUNNEL-WEB

Image from Wikipedia

It’s one of the world’s most deadly spiders. The Sydney funnel-web likes to wander into yards and houses looking for females around mating time. They can also stray into swimming pools and survive for days underwater. If cheated, this spider can get highly aggressive and inflict multiple bites in a flash.

SPIDER FACTS

1. Relative to its size, a spider’s web is twice as strong as steel.
2. The combined length of strands in a sider’s web can be up to 60 meters.
3. The weight of insects eaten by spiders each year is more than the weight of an entire population.

What are robots, really?

Robot scientists (called roboticists) define robots as reprogrammable brains that move a body but even souped-up remote-controlled vehicles can be called robots. We tend to think of robots as anthropomorphic — geek speak for human-shaped — but that is not usually the case. Most of today’s robots are simple robotic arms used in manufacturing plants worldwide.  Try making friends with that!

Still, some robots have made their way into people’s homes. The Electrolux Trilobite, for example, is a robot the size of a throw pillow that vacuums your home. It plots out its course, navigates around your furniture while sucking up dirt, and returns to its dock to recharge when its batteries run out. Not quite your robot buddy but it’s better than you doing the housework.

Moving Around

Getting a robot to walk on two legs is one of the most difficult things for roboticists. (Makes you realize how wonderfully advanced our bodies are). The most famous walking robot is Honda’s Asimo. Just over three feet high, this robot pop star has already been to several countries and met a few lucky girls and boys. Some robots, like Sony’s charming robot dog, Aibo, walk on all fours. Other robots roll around on treads like tanks or on wheels, and some even tiptoe like a spider on eight legs!

Make stuff, not war

Even if robots today aren’t as advanced as the robots in movies or cartoons, they are good for performing repetitive tasks. Imagine attaching doors to a car all day, every day for the rest of your life? That would be dull, dull, DULL! For tasks like these, it’s best to let a robot do it for you — they are stronger and more precise. Robots are also good for working in dangerous situations, like taking gas and lava samples from an active volcano. They don’t breathe so poison fumes won’t harm them, and their metal bodies can withstand much more heat than your fragile skin. Robots can also go to places humans can’t. They can explore Mars or dive the depths of the Atlantic Ocean in search for sunken ships.

Tech Tidbit!

Do you know where the word “robot” comes from? In 1920, Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek wrote R.U.R. (short for Rossum’s Universal Robots). The play became a worldwide success. Capek got the term from his brother Josef, who derived it from the Czech word Robota, meaning drudgery or servitude.

Image via Wikipedia

So let’s do the math. It takes 1000 milliseconds to equal one second. That means if days are shorter by 6.8 milliseconds every day, it will take 147 days for us to be ahead by a full second.

We have to take this further in the future to really see something more impressive. In a little over four years, about June of 2014, our world will be a full 10 seconds ahead of time that we normally would have been if the Chile earthquake hadn’t occured.

10 seconds not impressive enough for you? Well then I guess you’re not enough of a science geek. Allow me to blow your mind.

In a little over 24 years, in 2034, we will be a full minute ahead of time. That means on a nice May afternoon when it was really supposed to be 3:02 pm, it will actually be 3:03pm!

So all because of the Chile earthquake, it’s like we’re traveling ahead in time 6.8 milliseconds every day!

Freaky.

These providers soon learned that Zhora preferred beer to vodka. Russia is not known for brewing world-class beer, but it’s doubtful that Zhora fretted about the taste. Like elephants, who are famously and often dangerously rowdy when they get a snoot full, Zhora was into it for the buzz.

Zoo visitors are also credited for turning Zhora on to cigarettes, which he quickly became addicted to. Soon the chimp’s cage became a very noisy place, as Zhora shamelessly screamed at and cajoled anyone in hailing distance to fix him up with a beer or a smoke, and preferably both. The two vices apparently go together even in the simian world.

Guys just want to have fun. Wikimedia commons.

Zhora’s habits did not temper his libido; he got more than his share of the ladies and sired several baby chimps. Perhaps even the homelier females started to look good to him after a few beers. There’s no word on whether he habitually lit one up after sex.

Though visitors were delighted by Zhora’s substance abusing antics, officials of the Rostov Zoo grew concerned about his health. “We asked visitors not to give him (alcohol and cigarettes), but it was all in vain,” one declared. Even augmented fencing proved ineffective in preventing visitors from getting contraband into the cage.

Zhora’s handlers concluded that sudsy chimp needed an intervention, so the shipped him off to a rehab facility in Kazan. Unlike his human counterparts in America, he probably won’t be rubbing elbows with celebrities or troubled politicians, nor will he be working a 12-step program or attending meetings. The only humans he is likely to see will be veterinarians, who won’t give Zhora what he really wants, though they may give him something to help with the shakes.

After all, giving up drinking and smoking at the same time has got to be a bitch, even for those who walk on all fours.

The ability of birds to find their way home is equally amazing. Birds have been taken by airplane fro their home to places 400 miles away. When they were set free, they flew back to their home!

To say they have an instinct to ” go home” doesn’t really explains the mystery. How do they find their way? We know that young birds are not taught the road by their parents, because often parents fly off first on the annual migrations, And birds who fly home often fly by night, so they can’t see landmarks to guide them. Other birds fly over water, where there are no landmarks of any kind.

One theory is that birds can sense the magnetic fields that surround the earth. Magnetic lines of force Magnetic lines of force stretch from the north to the south magnetic poles. Perhaps the birds direct themselves by these lines. But this theory has never been proven.

The fact is, science just doesn’t have a full explanation of how birds find their way when they migrate or fly home! An interesting bit of history is related to the migration of birds. When Columbus was approaching the American continent, he saw great flocks of birds flying southwest. This meant land was near, so he changed his direction to the southwest, to follow the direction taken by the birds. And that’s why he landed in the Bahamas, instead of on the Florida coast!

From this beilef a dance called the tarantella developed. It is a very lively Italian dance that gets faster and faster until the end. While the bite of tarantula is fatal to small insects and small animals, there is no evidence that it is poisonous to man. But the fear of tarantula is still strong among the people where it is found.

True tarantula are found only in Southern Europe and are named after the city of Taranto in Italy. They have hairy bodies about three quarters of an inch ling. Like some other spiders, they don’t spin webs. Instead they dig deep burrows, which they line with silk. During the winter they shut themselves up in their houses with a silken door and hibernate until spring.

Tarantulas wait for their prey somewhat like tigers. They lie hidden among leaves or rubbish or within their burrows. When an insect comes along, they rush out, bite it, and then drag it into their burrows. That bite either kills the insect or paralyzes it so it is helpless.

The spider then eats at its leisure. Tarantulas don’t chew or swallow their victims. They suck out the blood and body juices. But when it comes to their own youn, tarantulas are very considerate. They keep their cocoons in their houses, and carry them when they go out. When the young hatch, they ride on the mother’s back for a week or so.

But if to you were to go to KingCheetah’s Place for Felines right now at kingcheetahpf.webs.com, you would get the following error message: “Important Notice! KingCheetah’s Place for Felines has been permanently shut down do to many issues. Along with the closure of this site, the podcast feeds will be taken down as well.” So does this message really mean what it says? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes”. KingCheetah’s Place for Felines has permanently closed down, and will never be in existence again.

Now you ask the question: “Why? What exactly happened that made KingCheetah shut down the site?” Well here it is: According to KingCheetah, the closure of K.P.F. happened because of many reasons, such as: low site traffic, no use of the K.P.F. community system at all, and there was also a lot of technical issues. Now what could be the root of these problems? Well here is KingCheetah’s explanation: “Well, I’m pretty sure the reason why there was such low traffic is probably because of the same reason my former website did, and that is two reasons, actually,” he said earlier today. “The first reason would be because there was no announcements prior to the launch of K.P.F., and there was absolutely no advertising done at all. There was plans to have advertisements and infomercials on YouTube and other video sharing websites later on, but now I know the advertising and the announcing should’ve been done about four months before K.P.F. was launched.

“Now the other reason why the site lacked traffic was do to the fact that I was sort of ‘reinventing the wheel’, if you know what I mean. Online forums, like the one on K.P.F., were first introduced in 1996, and they were mostly popular from that year, probably until about 1999. Forums are still widely used today, but they’re just not something you would use to gain massive amounts of traffic these days. The thing that people are really looking for now is a more sophisticated online community where you post various types of content without a bunch of technological limitations and having to know BBCode. What people want now is something like Myspace and Facebook. Now there was a plan to create something like that using an online community creation software, and it could’ve been easily done; but there was other problems I had to deal with besides upgrading the structure of K.P.F.”

So, along with fact that the way K.P.F. operated was a bit “old-school”, KingCheetah stated that there were technical problems that occurred. Such problems mentioned were things like podcast feed services failing to fulfill the needs of K.P.F. According to KingCheetah, that dragged down the website a lot, and turned a lot of people away that had hoped they would find some interesting content about felines. Apparently there was a way to correct those problems by using different technology, and switching all of K.P.F.’s media over to other servers, but it would’ve taken about six months to set up the media system and do various tests to ensure the new system was reliable, and KingCheetah felt that he might as well have just started over and created a new website. So, that is the explanation for the closure of KingCheetah’s Place for Felines.

There is a possibility that KingCheetah will create a new, and even better place for feline fanatics to explore and get involved in, but no plans of one have been confirmed.

To keep in touch with what is happening with KingCheetah, just follow this link: The Big C, and then click the subscription symbol, which is at the top of your browser and on the left of the URL in the address bar.

(podcast subscribtion symbol looks like this)

Algae can be used as a fuel due to its innate chemical properties. It uses carbon dioxide, nutrients, and solar energy to create an oil compound stored within itself. The oil is extracted using one of three methods, each of varying efficiency. The first method is simply using an oil press, similar to an olive press in function, to remove up to 75% of the contained oil. When this process is followed up by the usage of hexane, a liquid solvent derived from petroleum, that number goes up to 95%. The hexane is mixed in with the leftover algae and then put through a filter, which causes most of the remaining oil contained within the algae to separate. The third method is known as the supercritical fluids method, which involves extremely pressurized and heated carbon dioxide – the supercritical fluid – being mixed with the algae to completely turn the algae into oil. While this yields 100% of the algae’s usable oil, it is relatively impractical due to the equipment necessary to fulfill the reaction (Newman 2009). Because of these problems, SGI seeks to bioengineer a new type of algae that constantly secretes oil from its cell walls, removing the need to continuously harvest and replenish the algae stores (Synthetic Genomics Inc 2009). This could potentially be the most efficient of all of the methods, though it is still in the early stages of development.

The extracted oil is then refined using fatty acid chains in transesterification, which involves mixing an ester and alcohol compound. A catalyst is mixed with an alcohol, creating a biodiesel fuel combined with a glycerol which is then further refined to remove the glycerol and create the final fuel product (Newman 2009). On the molecular level, this is a feasible and universal process; the real question with algae biofuels is how they can effectively be produced on a large-scale basis.

This production method is precisely what SGI and Exxon seek to discover (ExxonMobil 2009). There are two specific techniques being researched by the companies as of now: open-pond growing and closed-tank bioreactor plants. The former is akin to farming the algae, and involves growing algae in ponds. The problems faced with this process are primarily natural, as the algae must be kept in hot, sunny areas with water at a constant temperature. For better regulation of algae production, indoor facilities can be used to grow algae at optimum conditions inside large, round drums. Nutrients, carbon dioxide, and water are pumped into the containers and oil is continuously extracted (Newman 2009).

Despite these difficulties, Exxon and SGI claim that the potential benefits of algae are worth taking a look at. Algae is a non-food product and can be grown in areas unused for farming, unlike other biofuels such as corn. It is the most efficient of all biofuels, and an acre devoted to the growth of algae is estimated to produce 2,000 gallons of fuel per year. When that is compared to palm (650 gallons) and corn (250 gallons), it is easy to see why algae is so promising. Algae biofuel can easily be incorporated with current fuel infrastructure, and modern car engines can run on it without any modifications (Synthetic Genomics Inc 2009). If SGI and Exxon are successful in their endeavors, algae will likely become commercially viable within five to ten years as the price of oil rises and demand for new fuel grows (ExxonMobil 2009).

References

ExxonMobil. (2009). Algae biofuels. In ExxonMobil. Retrieved from http://www.exxonmobil.com/‌Corporate/energy_climate_con_vehicle_algae.aspx

Newman, S. (2009). How algae biodiesel works. In How Stuff Works. Retrieved from http://science.howstuffworks.com/‌algae-biodiesel.htm

Synthetic Genomics Inc. (2009). Next generation algae biodiesels fact sheet. In Synthetic Genomics Inc. Retrieved from http://www.syntheticgenomics.com/‌media/‌emrefact.html

Synthetic Genomics Inc. (2009). Next generation fuels & chemicals. In Synthetic Genomics Inc. Retrieved from http://www.syntheticgenomics.com/‌what/‌renewablefuels.html

So is it working? Yes and no.  Some scientists point out that if “your field is ‘hot’ enough, you can be sure someone will use those ideas to their own benefit, very likely at your expense” but that, on the other hand, the Open Notebook can be quite useful  for publicizing yourself and asking general questions about method.  Others think that people are too busy with their own work to publish someone else’s.  And still others think ONS has incredible potential to at least alert supervisors to easily preventable mistakes.  And some are even hopeful that funding agencies will take a greater interest in the Open Notebook.

Despite the early enthusiasm, the response of the academic community has, thus far, been underwhelming.  It seems that researchers want the benefit of open access but are somewhat reluctant to put their own results online and, worse still, there does not appear to be a single favorite site people go to.  Or even several favorite sites.  (So if you have never heard of ONS until now, this is probably why.) 

Still, some magazines (like the Scientific American) are taking note of the Open Notebook even while noting that “the acceptance of any such measure would require a big change in the culture of academic science”.  But if blogger-scientists are right and the funding is there Open Notebook Science may take off.