Connected on 2008-01-15 10:45:00 from Park Ridge, IL, US
- 9:44am
- Bugscope Team session enabled, rxl started, starting presets. 9:42AM.
- 9:50am
- 9:57am
- 10:03am
- 10:14am
- Bugscope Team presets are done. ready for school to login.
- 10:21am
- 10:26am
- 10:31am
- Teacher Hi! This is Tony.
- Bugscope Team hi tony!
- Bugscope Team welcome to bugscope
- Bugscope Team we are ready for you. i'm unlocking the session now.
- Bugscope Team Whoa Hello!
- Teacher Now all we need are some students.
- Bugscope Team :)
- Bugscope Team Yeah we are ready to roll -- I was just messing with the 'scope and not paying attention to who might be online.
- Bugscope Team we had some cookies in the lab that were distracting us
- Bugscope Team You are welcome to drive around if you would like.
- Teacher Pulvillus--what's that?
- 10:37am
- Bugscope Team The pulvillus is the pad on the forearm (tarsus) of an insect that clings to the ceiling or to glass -- it
- Bugscope Team is a sitcky pad.
- Bugscope Team sticky
- Bugscope Team the individual setae on the pulvillus are called tenent setae.
- Bugscope Team It would be Latin as in the Spanish word tener.
- Bugscope Team to hold or to have
- Teacher Is this preset #6?
- Bugscope Team no delay here at all
- Bugscope Team the setae we see now on the fruit fly eye (this is not a preset) are helpful in gauging wind direction
- Bugscope Team with IE7 that is, sorry ignore that
- Teacher Or French - tenir.
- Bugscope Team yeah Cool.
- 10:43am
- Bugscope Team maybe FF with XP
- Bugscope Team Hello all
- Teacher Mrs. Smaha informed me yesterday that her class may not be here right at 10:45. She didn't say why, but she said that the kids will be paired up this time (to cut down on traffic) and they did write up some quesitons in advance.
Bugscope Team excellent, that is all fine with us. we are ready anytime.
- Teacher Now, I have a logistical question for you. I've been after my seventh grade teachers to sign up for a session. One of their issues is that they teach 3 - 4 sections a day, and they don't see how they could tie up your site for that much time during a school day. How have you handled that time of scenario?
Bugscope Team that is doable. we'd just need to make sure we all don't have other commitments that day. if you schedule a month in advance or more, then we should be alright. just go aheda and have the teacher sign up for sessions via the application, and we'll work it out.
- Teacher TYPE of scenario
- 10:48am
- Bugscope Team this is the housefly, right in thje middle of the stub
- Bugscope Team you can see the haltere now. it is colllapsed
- Teacher This is COOL.
Bugscope Team we think so too, thanks!
- Teacher Reminds me of that movie FANTASTIC VOYAGE. Anybody old as I am who can remember that flick?
- Bugscope Team this is probably a female fly -- in the females the eyes are spaced far apart and in the male flies the eyes are often close together
- Bugscope Team Raquel Welch.
- 10:53am
- Bugscope Team ha!
- Bugscope Team i knew scott would remember raquel!
- Bugscope Team I am not sure why males and female fly eyes are different
- Teacher I didn't remember the actors.
- Teacher I was just a kid then.
- Bugscope Team It's the Baryshnikov gene.
- Bugscope Team Scott's a savant for things like that ;)
- Bugscope Team Hi Annie!
- Bugscope Team Hi Scott!
- Bugscope Team i grew up watching movies like terminator and aliens, so i'm into out space, not inner space...
- Bugscope Team Annie are you coming in today, later?
- Bugscope Team yup
- Bugscope Team Annie the other thing -- are you geting any delay in typing text, here, in Firefox?>
- Bugscope Team Now mine is fine...
- Bugscope Team nope, no delay
- Teacher Kids should be here soon.
- Bugscope Team I think Chas is coding away and fixed something.
- Bugscope Team we are ready for the kids!
- 11:01am
- Bugscope Team opened a tab to gmail, now there is lag!
- Bugscope Team i'm going to close my IE7 session now.
- Bugscope Team ack, sorry, ignore that
- 11:08am
- Bugscope Team Dr Clishem and Ms Smaha how are things going there?
- Bugscope Team Hello! Welcome to Bugscope!
- Bugscope Team Hi guys!
- Bugscope Team Please let us know when you have questions about what you see, or anything else...
- Bugscope Team this is the eye -- the compound eye -- of a housefly.
- Guest what is this
- Bugscope Team We're looking at a compound eye right now
- Bugscope Team this is the eye of a housefly.
- Bugscope Team of a housefly
- Bugscope Team this is a fly eye, it is a compound eye
- Bugscope Team if you zoom in you'll see all the small parts in the eye
- Bugscope Team it is likely a female because male fly eyes are often close together and those of females are often spaced further apart.
- Guest what is a compound eye?
Bugscope Team many insects have compound eyes, they are visual organs used for sight. compound eyes consist of thousands of ommatidia, which are the individual eye facets. zoom in to seem them better.
- Bugscope Team Although I don't know why the boys and girls have different eyes.
- Bugscope Team the individual facets of the eye are called ommatidia, and they are the reason it is called a compound eye -- because it has many lenses.
- Bugscope Team the Baryshnikov gene
- Bugscope Team for close-set eyes
- Bugscope Team Ohhhh, I get it now!
- Bugscope Team a simple eye is more like what we have
- Guest what is your favorite specimen
- Bugscope Team Ilike mites and ticks
- Student this is very interesting
- Bugscope Team I like earwigs because they often have mites, but we have no earwigs today
- 11:13am
- Teacher Some of our students are losing the chat box on their screen. Why is that?
Bugscope Team They had it and it went away, or they never saw it? If the latter, perhaps they don't have enough screen space. You can try making more by hitting F11 to go to full-screen (if on Windows)
- Bugscope Team also crustaceans have compoiund eyes as well
- Guest have you ever look at a animal brain
Bugscope Team We usually don't look at soft tissues in Bugscope sessions.
- Bugscope Team I like to look at mosquitos and other parasites---they have very interesting adaptations to a parasitic lifestyle
- Bugscope Team sorry ms. smaha about the chat problem. do the kids have the browser maximized?
- Bugscope Team when we look at animal brains we usually do light microscopy or transmission electron microscopy.
- Teacher They saw the chat box, then it went away.
Bugscope Team So is there just a blank spot there with no text now? I haven't heard of this happening before
- Bugscope Team can you ask them to hit F5 (function key), that refreshes the screen
- Bugscope Team now we can see individual ommatidia up close
- Student This is very COOL
- Guest where do you get your specimens?
Bugscope Team From schools, from people who know us, from friends and family, and occasionally from the entomology department here at the University of Illinois
- Guest what do you usually look at
- Guest Why do you use gold dust on your specimins?
Bugscope Team We coat the specimens with a thin layer of gold palladium to make them easier to image. The gold and the palladium have more electrons that the plain specimen does...so when the specimen is coated with gold palladium there are more electrons available to create the image
- Student THis looks like a honeycomb and beehive
Bugscope Team yes, sometimes the compound eyes look like honeycombs, that's because of the octogonal shape
Bugscope Team The shape is very efficient (more so than perfectly round circles) because there is no wasted space between compartments. That's likely the reason you see it frequently
- Bugscope Team if the eye was broken we would see that it is crystal-like in cross-seciton
- Bugscope Team we collect what we can and people send us samples as well
- Bugscope Team Hi Cate!
- Guest have you ever seen anything that could cure a disease
- Student Has anyone ever tried to steal a gold coated bug?
Bugscope Team The coating of gold is so thin that it's probably worth less than a penny, so no. The gold "targets" we use to get gold from to put on the bugs are fairly valuable though, although we haven't had any problem with them going missing
- Bugscope Team We coat our samples with gold-palladium to make them conductive.
- 11:18am
- Student what is your favorite bug that you have ever looked at
- Student THis is very cool
- Bugscope Team Tommy sometimes we look at drugs or drug delivery systems.
- Guest What is the biggest thing you ever looked at?
Bugscope Team well, the miscroscope has a chamber that is small, so we can't look at big bugs really. the idea is rather to look at really smalls things, even smaller than bugs!
- Guest why do you put gold dust on your specimins
Bugscope Team the gold dust is on the bugs so that when the electron beam inside the scope hits the bugs with the gold on it, small parts of the dust (electrons) fly off and are collected by the camera. this is how the image is acquired
- Student How long did you have to go to school to be a scientist?
Bugscope Team I went to four years of undergraduate college, and this is my fifth year of graduate schoole
- Student have you ever looked at a living bug
- Student what is the most interesting diesiese you have looked at
- Bugscope Team that was a long answer
- Bugscope Team we sputter atoms of gold and palladium alloy onto the sample to make it conductive so that the electrons will come out of the sample and not go into it and stay
- Guest How old were u when u wanted to be a scintest?
Bugscope Team I decided that I wanted to be an entomologist when I was a senior in high school
- Guest cool
- Guest how many jerms did you see this year
Bugscope Team we see lots and lots of germs -- like bacteria -- TNTC. That means Too Numerous To Count.
- Student What's the most interesting thing that you have looked at on a microscope
- Bugscope Team I decided in college that I had better take Biology or I might end up being an English teacher.
- Student At what age did you want to become a scientist?
- Student that is very intesting
- Student Why are the pictures black and white?
Bugscope Team Color is a feature of the difference between how different pigments reflect different wavelengths of light. We're not using light, we're using electrons. There is no good analog to color when using electrons, so we see only a single-color "intensity" signal
- Student have you ever looked at a living bug
Bugscope Team yeah we have looked at a Monarch butterfly chrysalis, and the butterfly hatched after the session
- Student What other kinds of microscopes do you use?
Bugscope Team We have light microscopes, scanned probe microscopes, and electron microscopes. There are many variations...
Bugscope Team we have electron microscopes, atomic force microscopes, light microscopes, and also a near field scanning scope.
- Student where do you get your specimens
- Student Why do scientists look in microspoes, what is the purpose?
Bugscope Team we try to look at things that we can't normally see with the naked eye, like with insects, there are a lot of cool things to look at!
- 11:23am
- Guest what is the specimen you don't like
- Student have you ever looked at a living bug
Bugscope Team One time I looked at a beetle larva that was not quite dead yet. I was lucking it didn't explode
- Student What kind of things do you like to look at?
- Guest Have you ever looked at animals organs
- Student How old are u going to be when you get to your carrier
Bugscope Team Annie is closer to starting a career than I am, but probably late 20's as a ballpark figure
Bugscope Team That is a good question. I hope to graduate next summer, when I am 27. I really really hope
- Student i think this is a great website and i like it alot
Bugscope Team thank you!
- Student how many protists do you look@
- Student What is this bug?
- Guest do you take turns looking at specimens
- Student what is the biggest thing u look at?
- Student have you ever dissected an insect and then looked at its insides
Bugscope Team We don't typically do this with an SEM because the insides are very soft and would have to be tediously prepared otherwise they'd just look like mush
- Teacher In the student window, the chat area is getting sqëezed. They are not seeing their questions.
Bugscope Team you may be at a small resolution? if you can, change the screen res to 1280x1024, that is the recommended minimum
- Bugscope Team Here we teach students to use the microscopes to do their own research, and they do all kinds of different things.
- Student Whos Annie?
Bugscope Team Annie is one of the bugscope team logged on with us today. She's a Ph.D student in the Entomology department here at UIUC
- Guest what is the most intersting specimen
- Student can i look at the joint
- Student have you ever gone to places to collect specimens
Bugscope Team I did in highschool when I took an insect collection course!
Bugscope Team Ooh me! Me! I have been on many collecting trips. I have been to Costa Rica, Mexico, and all over the US.
- Guest what is this bug? is it a fly.i want to look at the wing!!!
- Bugscope Team That should have been lucky a few answers below...I can't type!!!
- Student Who do you give the information to after you have written it down?
- Student why is it so hairy
- Student When did you become a scientist
Bugscope Team I started in college and never stopped
- Guest whos chas?
Bugscope Team I'm part of the bugscope team. I'm also a graduate student at the University of Illinois in engineering
- Guest how many hairs are on a spider
- Guest what is your favorite specimen
- Guest your cool
- Bugscope Team there are thousands of tiny hairs (setae) on a spider
- Student what is your favorite food?
Bugscope Team definitely not bugs!
- Student are the hairs cilia or some kind of sensory thing
Bugscope Team The hairs, which we call setae, help the insect to sense its environment. Some setae are mechanosensory, meaning that they sense touch. Some setae are chemosensory, and they allow the insect to smell or taste things.
- Guest that is so cool
- Bugscope Team Ms. Smaha, if you are near a phone and need to call me, I'm at 217-265-8164. I'll try to help with the screen resolution
- Student what was the largest speciman you have observed
- Student How old were you when you came to the college to start your science major?
Bugscope Team I was ~18 when I started my undergraduate, I think that's pretty typical. I took a year off and worked between undergrad and grad school
Bugscope Team I was 18. I got a biology undergraduate degree before I went to graduate school
- Student Do you look at blood?
Bugscope Team It's a lot easier to look at blood with a light microscope than the electron microscope we're using now. So no, very rarely
- 11:28am
- Bugscope Team I was 1when I went to college, but I took my time getting my degree
- Bugscope Team 17
- Bugscope Team not 1!]
- Student do just look @ bugs
Bugscope Team The microscope gets used for many other things than bugs. Micro and nano-tech stuff, geological things, manufactured crystals, all kinds of things
- Student when did you start getting interested in being a scientist
Bugscope Team I think I always liked to learn about nature. As a kid I caught frogs and beetles and lizzards and all that kind of stuff. And so, I think I must have become interested in science when I was a litle kid.
- Bugscope Team Chas started working on bugscope when he was 15.
- Student What is your favorite protist?
- Student how long have you been looking at these kind of things
- Student what is the biggest bug you have looked at
Bugscope Team In my research, I have looked at beetles that are 2-3 inches long. But I only look at parts of the beetle, not the whole thing.
- Guest can you look at big things like snakes
Bugscope Team in this microscope you cannot image anything more than 50 mm across or tall
Bugscope Team maybe pieces of snakes, though i have never seen one in the 'scope
- Student that looks interesting
- Student what are the spikes for
- Student what are the spikes on this and what is this
- Guest do you look at intestins
- Student What is this thing?
- Guest What is your favorite protist to look at
- Bugscope Team this is a mold spore!
- Student why is there spikes on it(sorry)
Bugscope Team the spikes, i think, make it easier to stick to things
- Student how does mold give u allergies
- Student what was your favorite speciman you looked at?
- Student What are the little nubby things on the mold that we are looking at??
- Bugscope Team You can see that the spikes help the mold spore stick to things.
- Bugscope Team Like pollen grains...
- Guest can we look at fur?
- Student Do you look at animal ears?
- Bugscope Team You could look at fur if we had it in the 'scope today.
- Student What are we looking at?
- Guest whos cate? ????
- Student Do you prepare your own specimens?
Bugscope Team yes, we take the specimens schools send us, prep them, and put them into the microscope, which is a vacuum
- Bugscope Team this is a mold spore, up close
- Bugscope Team cool image!
- Student What are we looking at?
- Student Do you look at eyes
Bugscope Team we have fruit fly eye as a preset in the scope today
- Bugscope Team we work with people who work with brain tissue, and people who grow nerve cells on slides, and people who grow fibroblasts, and people who put genes in bacteria...
- 11:33am
- Student oh that is very interestin g
- Guest that's cool i want to look at a butterfly!!!
- Bugscope Team a long time ago I looked at rabbit corneas.
- Student \
- Student cool!!!!!!!!!
- Guest do you think butterfly wings are cool
Bugscope Team they can be cool to look at, but it is hard to keep them from charging
- Student Do you look at protits
- Student i think that this is a great learning eperience
Bugscope Team Thanks Matt and Luke...we hope it is a great learning experience!
- Bugscope Team an ophthalmologist was testing a laser to see how it shaped the cornea
- Student have you ever looked at the dust on a butterflys or moths wings
- Student Have you ever lokked at liccce
- Student Do you look at protists?
- Bugscope Team yes we have looked at lice
- Student why is there holes in the butterfly wings
Bugscope Team The holes are there to reduce the weight of the wings. They need to be a very efficient shape to provide lots of lift while not weighing the insect down
- Guest do you watch animal planet to get ideas
- Guest have you ever at liese
- Student y r ther lines on the wing?
- Bugscope Team the holes make the scales lighter in weight
- Student do you enjoy your job
- Student I think this is really great that you are spending time for us?
Bugscope Team Thanks. We enjoy getting to share our knowledge with classes and give them access to something that probably no highschool has
- Student what is this weird bug(if it is one)
- Bugscope Team this is one of the most fun parts of our job -- doing this
- Student you guys are really smart with looking at all these things
- Student that is cool
- Guest whats your favorite bug
Bugscope Team My favorite insects are longhorned beetles....that is what I am studying for my PhD
- Student Do you look at brain
- Bugscope Team several groups we work with study brain tissue
- Bugscope Team this is a roly poly
- Guest your coooooooooooooool
- Guest do you like your job
- Student what is the biggest speciman you have observed
Bugscope Team Large moths, grasshoppers, and beetles are about the largest we've fit on the stub. The stub is only 2 inches in diameter, and our lowest magnification available is ~30x so you can't see the whole thing at once when it's that large
- Bugscope Team longhorned beetles often have mites on them as well
Bugscope Team and sometimes pseudoscorpions!
- Bugscope Team even a cicada is large for this microscope
- Student chas when where you interesed in being a scientist
Bugscope Team I have pretty much always wanted to do science. I grew up familiar with it because my dad is a professor, and got involved with Bugscope when I was 15 and have been doing lots of it ever since
- 11:38am
- Student Do you have any other subjects at college?
- Student why did you want to be a scientist
- Student whats ur favorite specimen to look at?
- Guest have you ever looked look at food
- Student Why do you want to be a scientist
Bugscope Team I really like discovering new things, especially about the beetles that I study.
- Bugscope Team I studied English and for the first several years I did this I edited scientific papers as well
- Guest how many bugs have u killed
Bugscope Team Lots...probably thousands...that sounds really bad, doesn't it?
- Student Hey thanks chas for answering our questions?
Bugscope Team No problem, I'm doing my best to keep up
- Guest why are intersted in scienc
- Student where do you get your specimans from
Bugscope Team We get specimens from Bugscope participants sometiems. Other times we get them from entomology students who don't want their collections.
- Guest can u look at food?
Bugscope Team You certainly can
- Student your pretty sweet
- Guest gfdjghf
- Student do you look at animal tears?
Bugscope Team The specimens have to be sealed in an air-tight vacuum chamber while they're being imaged which causes all the moisture to evaporate. For that reason we don't usually get to look at liquids, or wet things. That's why bugs are great, because they have hard-dry exoskeletons so we don't have to do any complex drying steps
- Student sorry for th question mark chas!
- Bugscope Team we can and od look at food
- Guest your cool
- Guest answer
- Student luky
- Student chas that must be fun having a dad as a proffeser
- Student gtg
- Guest thaks for answering our
- Student thank you for our time
- Student tahnks everyone bye!!
- Student this was great
- Bugscope Team Thank You!
- Bugscope Team thank you students, you were great!
- Student thank you for answering
- Student thank you for every thing chas and chas 2
- Student seeing this stuff was great
- Bugscope Team Glad you guys have enjoyed!
- 11:43am
- Teacher Hi folks . . . This is TONY . . . The kids had to bolt to lunch. We got squeezed by the schedule. The kids want to know if they can still do this when they go home. We said that they could go to the web site without the chat.
Bugscope Team tony, hi, the session information is SAVED online, images, chat, everything. just tell the students to go to: http://bugscope.itg.uiuc.edu/members/2007-079
- Teacher One more thing - What is the longest time period you could go with a session. 90 minutes? 2 hours? This would be something I could take back to my 7th grade teachers.
Bugscope Team tony, you can do a long session, 2-3 hours even, but we'd need at least a month notice.
- Bugscope Team tony, sorry about the resolution problem, we had some previous session that were 1024x768 and we didn't get complaints. but maybe we should require 1280x1024 from now on?
- Teacher We changed it to 1280 x 960, and it looked fine.
Bugscope Team awesome!
- Bugscope Team Good Deal Laurie.
- Bugscope Team smaha, if you schedule a long session 2-3 hours, make sure to fill out the application at least a month in advance.
- Bugscope Team I am sorry at the very end I got a call and had to drop out
- Teacher From now on, we'll make sure the resolution is set appropriately for the kids.
Bugscope Team okay, and we'll try to note that on the website somewhere. 1280x960 is a common widescreen (laptop) resolution.
- 11:50am
- Bugscope Team smaha, did you get the members page link?
- Bugscope Team the link with all the chat and images from this session, that you can give to your students?
- Bugscope Team the link is: http://bugscope.itg.uiuc.edu/members/2007-079
- Bugscope Team we ready to close the session?
- Bugscope Team good session everyone
- Bugscope Team rxl stopped
- Bugscope Team session disabled
- Bugscope Team session finished.
- Bugscope Team goodbye!
