Connected on 2011-11-11 12:00:00 from Morris, New Jersey, United States
- 10:50am
- Bugscope Team sample is in chamber and pumping down
- Bugscope Team almost ready to turn on the electron beam
- 10:55am
- Bugscope Team looks good so far. back in a few...
- 11:14am
- 11:20am
- 11:27am
- 11:32am
- 11:38am
- Bugscope Team Hello!
- Bugscope Team Welcome to Bugscope!
- Bugscope Team Looking for bacteria right now.
- 11:43am
- 11:49am
- Bugscope Team we are ready to go!
- Bugscope Team SCI5!
- Bugscope Team Hello!
- Teacher Hi Scott! We're looking forward to seeing the samples in a few minutes. Do you have a favorite?
- 11:55am
- Bugscope Team this is the centipede, which is super tiny but looks just like an adult
- Bugscope Team you can see its compound eye, middle rightside of the screen
- Bugscope Team and its antennae
- Bugscope Team now you can see the base of the antenna, and a bit of the eye
- Bugscope Team ha yeah!
- Bugscope Team the compound eye!
- Teacher can you see what we see?
Bugscope Team yes!
- Bugscope Team I just made the image brighter
- Bugscope Team the large thing is the antenna
- Bugscope Team hope you don't want to count its legs
- Bugscope Team the centipede has sharp little fangs just below its face
- 12:00pm
- Bugscope Team you can click on any of the presets you see on the lefthand screen
- Bugscope Team if you click on the lefthand arrow that screen will pull into the center
- Teacher I'm glad you made it brighter because I think I over-adjusted the contrast!
Bugscope Team it takes a little getting used to, and it is difficult when feedback is delayed
- Bugscope Team let us know whenever you have questions about anything
- Teacher I have students coming in so I'll be back in contact in a few minutes
Bugscope Team totally cool
- Bugscope Team bacteria playing tug of war in a biofilm matrix
- 12:06pm
- Bugscope Team yellowjacket head, now
- Bugscope Team back to your favorite!
- Bugscope Team you can see the fangs pretty well
- Bugscope Team super sharp
- Teacher That's true! A great place to start. We would love to take a closer look at the fangs!
- Bugscope Team looks like you are doing quite well
- Bugscope Team they are much like spider fangs
- Bugscope Team we cannot see a poison pore at the tip, which is just out of view
- 12:11pm
- Bugscope Team the tiny things that look like hairs are called setae (see-tee)
- Teacher Is it true that the total magnification of the EM is 3 million X?
Bugscope Team some of the newest ones can do that
- Bugscope Team but if you try to go that high you have to have something to look at
- Teacher What is the total magnification of this microscope?
Bugscope Team we can go to a million x, but for research-quality (high quality) images we can go no higher than about 250,000x
- Teacher That's it! What is it?
- Teacher We would like to know what the what object is on the right/center of screen?
Bugscope Team this? It looks like a piece of a plant, with plant fibers
- Bugscope Team it's moving
- Bugscope Team the electron beam makes it shimmy a bit
- Teacher Thanks. We saw a clip today that showed how slides are prepared for the microscope. Are all of our insects coated in gold?
Bugscope Team they are coated with gold-palladium, which is finer than gold alone
- Teacher We also wanted to know what the cost of preparing a slide might be.
Bugscope Team um we charge $7 to coat a sample
- 12:16pm
- Bugscope Team did you watch the clip on this site?
- Bugscope Team there
- Bugscope Team is a video of Josie prepping a sample
- Teacher I can send you the YouTube link later.
- Bugscope Team cool
- Teacher Q: How can the fiber be moving if it is coated in gold/palladium?
Bugscope Team the Au/Pd makes it conductive, but if it is loose and small the electron beam can still knock it around
- Bugscope Team if we did not coat the samples, they would charge up with electrons, and they would not look good -- we would get nasty warped-looking images
- Bugscope Team this is the head of the mealworm pupa
- Bugscope Team these things creep me out when they move
- Teacher Each student raised a larva to adulthood - we weren't able to see them this close!
- 12:21pm
- Bugscope Team cool!
- Bugscope Team the beetle is forming inside
- Bugscope Team all insects, as adults, have six legs, a head, a thorax, and an abdomen
- Bugscope Team but as larvae and pupae they don't always follow those rules
- Bugscope Team this is the super tiny orb weaver spider
- Bugscope Team I broke a lot of legs and its palps off so we could see its eyes and chelicerae
- Bugscope Team the fangs are at the tips of the chelicerae
- Bugscope Team the fangs are pointed right at each other
- Bugscope Team they are curved inward, but you see a lot of dried fluid there that is obscuring them
- Teacher It looks like there is something in its fangs. What is it?
Bugscope Team it is mostly dried fluid, maybe venom
- 12:27pm
- Bugscope Team the thing that is glowing did not get well coated, and it is also a bit loose, so it is charging up with electrons
- Bugscope Team if you think about it, a lot of what we see here looks like broken bits of wax
- Bugscope Team when insects and arthropods like spiders die, they may throw up, and then its hard to see their moutharts
- Bugscope Team spiders have lots of setae that help them sense vibration
- Bugscope Team those are two big sugar crystals, and in the background are lots of tiny salt crystals
- Bugscope Team the salt is from a Wendy's restaurant, and it has this cool-looking incised pattern
- Teacher We placed our live spider in the freezer - do you think it would throw up?
Bugscope Team sometimes they do
- Bugscope Team spiders are difficult because much of their body is soft
- Bugscope Team most insects have a relatively hard shell around them -- the exoskeleton
- Bugscope Team spiders have the cephalothorax, which is hard, but the abdomen is soft and shrivels when it dies
- 12:32pm
- Teacher What is biofilm?
Bugscope Team some bacteria exude a polysaccharide matrix that resembles a gel, and they live within it
- Bugscope Team the biofilm protects them, so when you try to wash your food they do not always get washed away
- Teacher Is it a waste product?
Bugscope Team no it is a gel that they live and swim around in
- Teacher What are we looking at here?
- Bugscope Team that is the yellowjacket putting two of its tarsi in opposition
- Bugscope Team like a fist bump
- Bugscope Team the tarsi are the last five or so segments of a leg
- Bugscope Team see the claws?
- Bugscope Team the little setae we see help the yellowjacket feel what is touching it, like cat or rat whiskers
- Bugscope Team you can see some web there, from a spider, perhaps
- Bugscope Team the hook like thing is one of the claws
- 12:37pm
- Bugscope Team fly head
- Bugscope Team you can see its compound eye, and it sponging mouthparts to the right, a bit dried
- Bugscope Team on top of its head, from this view, you see one of the antennae, which has two portions
- Bugscope Team there is a branched, or aristate, portion, and there is a also a pad portion
- Teacher Regarding the setae, does that mean that the yellowjacket has nerve endings on its exoskeleton?
Bugscope Team the nerve endings are inside -- the setae are attached, through the cuticle (exoskeleton) to the nerves
- Bugscope Team we have skin with nerve endings in it, but insects have a shell and must use those hairs to help sense their environment
- Bugscope Team some of the setae are mechanosensory (touch), some are chemosensory (smell, taste), and some are thermosensory (hot/cold)
- Bugscope Team this is the aristae portion of the antenna. the lower portion has the Johnston's organ in it. That helps the fly sense up and down and wind currents.
- 12:42pm
- Bugscope Team many flying insects also have three simple eyes on the top of the head that help them stay oriented with the sun and thus help keep them from getting lost
- Bugscope Team the simple eyes on the top of the head, to the left here, are called ocelli.
- Bugscope Team that was an ocellus
- Bugscope Team there it is
- Bugscope Team it looks like a spider eye
- Bugscope Team there are three
- Bugscope Team usually
- Bugscope Team we just don't see all of them
- Bugscope Team the tiny hairs are called microsetae, and they are not sensory
- Bugscope Team they may help with thermoregulation
- Teacher Is it possible to see the mouth parts on this specimen?
Bugscope Team they are kind of shriveled, but yes
- Bugscope Team kind of like a muscular sponge
- Bugscope Team it is usually wet and sticky
- Bugscope Team this kind of fly spits up on its food and sucks up what dissolved
- 12:48pm
- Bugscope Team it's kind of like how spiders eat, but they inject venom into their prey that dissolve the inner organs, which they then suck up like a milkshake
- Bugscope Team these are the sponging mouthparts
- Bugscope Team now we are looking at nanoscale particles called brochosomes
- Bugscope Team the micron bar reads 2 microns, which is generally the length of a bacterium
- Bugscope Team brochosomes are often about 400 nanometers in diameter
- Teacher Q: What type of fluid do flies throw-up?
Bugscope Team it's saliva -- a digestive fluid
- 12:53pm
- Teacher They remind us of pollen
- Bugscope Team they are really beautiful
- Bugscope Team when we use the microscope for Bugscope we do not have the capacity to resolve as well as when we use it for research
- Bugscope Team when we use the microscope for research, we take the sample very close to the polepiece, which is where the electron beam comes from.
- Bugscope Team if we had these samples that close, we would not be able to go to low magnification to see whole insect
- Bugscope Team these are the two sets of palps
- Teacher How old are these samples? Since they are coated in gold/palladium, can you use them over and over?
Bugscope Team they are a few months old
- Bugscope Team we never re-use samples because we do not want one school to be seeing the same samples someone else has already looked at
- Bugscope Team but also, the samples actually do not last very long once they are sputter coated; they rot quickly
- Teacher Q about the microscope: How are the electrons stripped away from atoms (which atoms) for use in the SEM?
Bugscope Team there is a very high voltage going through the filament, or the emitter
- 12:58pm
- Bugscope Team the emitter is a cathode, and below it is an anode that pulls the electrons away at the same time they are being emitted from the cathode
- Bugscope Team the anode is the first component that makes the electron beam go in the direction we want it to
- Teacher What is a hamuli?
Bugscope Team hamuli are the winghooks that bees and wasps use to connect the fore- and hindwings when they fly
- Bugscope Team ugh I am afraid my explanation was so long that it did not go through
- Bugscope Team bees and wasps have four wings, and when they fly they hook the two wings on each side together so they have essentially two wings in flight
- 1:04pm
- Bugscope Team the high-energy electron beam knocks secondary electrons out of the coating on the surface of the sample, and we collect those as signal, which is in grayscale...
- Teacher Thank you so much for allowing us to participate! We enjoyed communicating with you and controlling the SEM!
Bugscope Team Thank You!
- Bugscope Team http://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu/members/2011-089
- Bugscope Team that is your member page
- Teacher Why all all SEM images in black and white?
Bugscope Team electrons are super small, smaller (obviously) than atoms, and they are much smaller than the wavelengths of light. but the answer is that when the electron beam hits the sample, or the conductive coat on the surface of the sample, it knocks sedcondary electrons out of the coating, and those electrons are what we collect, as signal.
- Bugscope Team there is the answer I'd been typing earlier
- Bugscope Team Robin and Jeannie are you still there?
- Bugscope Team shutting down
- Bugscope Team thank you, everyone!
