Connected on 2011-11-01 15:30:00 from Champaign, Illinois, United States
- 2:33pm
- Bugscope Team sample is pumping down
- Bugscope Team as soon as the sample is pumped down we will start setup
- 2:43pm
- Teacher hello - i
- Teacher I'm just getting set up - we won't start until our scheduled time of 3:30pm
- Bugscope Team Hello!
- Bugscope Team I'm just getting set up as well...
- 2:49pm
- 2:55pm
- Bugscope Team this is the trapdoor the moth climbed out of once it was finished becoming a moth
- Bugscope Team you can see that it is lined with scales
- 3:00pm
- Bugscope Team the door is to the right and down
- 3:06pm
- 3:13pm
- 3:18pm
- 3:24pm
- Teacher Hello, we're dividing into groups now and should be ready to go in a few minutes
- 3:30pm
- Bugscope Team great
- Student hello
- Bugscope Team Hello!
- Bugscope Team Welcome to Bugscope!
- Student we are here
- Student hello
- Student sup
- Bugscope Team this is an ant
- Bugscope Team it's tucked into a ball
- Student ah
- Bugscope Team who is going to be driving this afternoon
- Student what part of the ant are we looking at SEM?
- Student k
- Student what is an ant?
Bugscope Team it's a small insect that lives in colonies and is hated by all other insects
- Bugscope Team ants attack other insects, usually
- Student this probably isn't an ant
Bugscope Team what do you think it is?
- Student it might be a flea
Bugscope Team nope
- Student what is the triangular space that you can see?
Bugscope Team that is where the antenna is folded over
- Student I could be lice
Bugscope Team nope
- Student itoucl be lice
- Student bad spelling'\
- Student Acually it probably is an ant
Bugscope Team um Thank you for the vote of confidence
- Student This is a mosquito ommatidia
Bugscope Team this is another ant
- Bugscope Team ants are almost all female
- Bugscope Team the males, when you see them, have wings
- 3:35pm
- Bugscope Team okay who would like to drive the microscope?
- Student What is the smallest specimen that you have scoped
Bugscope Team you mean an insect? or a bug? there are mites in here today, really cool
- Bugscope Team and they are quite small
- Bugscope Team this is about 75 micrometers wide, quite small
- Bugscope Team it's living on a tiny parasitic wasp
- Bugscope Team this is close to the smallest living thing besides bacteria and diatoms, etc. that we have seen in the 'scope
- Bugscope Team this wasp has a mite on its eye
- 3:41pm
- Student woww
- Teacher How do you prepare the insects for the microscope?
Bugscope Team we let them dry in a place that is not wet so they don't rot, and then we attach them to a stub with doublestick carbon on it. we also use silver paint to help give them a conductive pathway to ground. then we coat the whole sample stub with gold-palladium, just a few nanometers, using a sputter coater
- Bugscope Team if someone would like to control the microscope please let me know
- Student Does that mean you can only view non-living organisms on your microscope?
Bugscope Team yes otherwise they would have to hold their breath for a long time, and that is not nice
- Teacher so i guess the SEM is not good for imaging live specimen
- Bugscope Team the specimen chamber is under vacuum
- Student what is the size of a stinger
Bugscope Team they can be all different sizes depending on what they are stinging. a stinger is a modified ovipositior
- 3:46pm
- Student what is a sputter coater?
Bugscope Team a sputter coater is a vacuum chamber that you can let argon gas into and run a charge through
- Bugscope Team when current is running through argon it becomes a plasma and attacks the target (gold-palladium, today), eroding atoms of Au/Pd and raining them all over the sample.
- Student can we control the microscope
Bugscope Team yes you now have control!
- Bugscope Team you can click on any of the presets, and you can change mag and focus as well as contrast/brightness
- Bugscope Team a $600,000 microscope you can control like a videogame
- Bugscope Team these are scales on the mosquito's proboscis
- Student What are the scale like features we are looking at?
Bugscope Team they are scales, and they serve a number of functions. one is that because they fall off easily, if the mosquito flies into a spiderweb it can leave the scales behind and slip out. sometimes.
- Student kjygrytuyuu92
- Bugscope Team scales also likely work like feathers; they also provide both structural and pigment-derived colors, and they likely help with thermoregulation
- Student il;
- Student can you give bug team the control
Bugscope Team sure!
- 3:52pm
- Bugscope Team bugs has control now
- Bugscope Team note that you can select from the presets, to the left
- Bugscope Team that is, you can choose another sample
- Bugscope Team the mosquitoes that bite are the females
- Bugscope Team male mosquitoes do not bite
- Bugscope Team this is salt from a Wendy's restaurant
- Student the salt is cool
- Bugscope Team it has a cool incised pattern that we think comes from an anticaking agent but really we do not know
- Bugscope Team most salt is a boring cube
- Student What are the bumps on the salt?
Bugscope Team those are a fine powder, and/or smaller cubes
- Student p
- Bugscope Team oh and a seta is a hair; the plural is setae
- Student Can the bug hunters take control?
Bugscope Team got it!
- Student of the microscope
- Bugscope Team Bug Hunters are now the supreme rulers
- 3:57pm
- Student Hi can we look at the spider eye?
Bugscope Team there are two of them we can see now
- Bugscope Team sorry they are kind of hard to see
- Bugscope Team they look like little domes
- Student That looks like a cactus.
Bugscope Team most of the spider's setae are sensory
- Student Can you please tell us what the hair like strands are?
Bugscope Team they are setae, and many are sensory -- touch, vibration, smell/taste, hot/cold
- Bugscope Team some spiders also have what are called 'urticating hairs' that make you inch
- Student How many eyes are in the image?
Bugscope Team just two
- Student Is there a membrane on the spider eye?
Bugscope Team yes and we cannot see through it with electrons
- Student Can we have control
Bugscope Team you have it now!
- Student Thank you, can you please give control to Purple Thunder?
- Bugscope Team these setae are said to help the fruit fly sense windspeed and direction
- Student What are the needle like strands
Bugscope Team those little bristles or setae are supposed to give the fruit fly information about windspeed and direction, but I don't think that is true
- Student what are the hair-like things
Bugscope Team they are setae (see-tee)
- 4:02pm
- Bugscope Team these are mechanosensory setae
- Bugscope Team like a cat or rat's whiskers
- Student where do you find all your test subjects
Bugscope Team we hunt them down
- Student What are the tiny particles on the eye?
Bugscope Team sometimes we cannot tell; some are the shape of the eye, of course
- Teacher For our last group, Mrs. Lisa, could we have control?
Bugscope Team Mrs Lisa now has control
- Bugscope Team insects and other similar arthropods have exoskeletons
Bugscope Team if you have an exoskeleton, it is kind on like wearing armor, so you need those setae to stick through the armor and help you sense your surroundings
- Student how many lenses are there
Bugscope Team there can be 5000 or even more per eye
- Bugscope Team the mite here is obscured by that spine/spike
- Student hat is the spike like things on the roach?
Bugscope Team those help the roach sense its environment as well, and also make it less easy to eat
- Student what is the spike
Bugscope Team it is likely a sensory spine/spike
- Bugscope Team this, now, is a scale from another insect
- Bugscope Team on this fruitfly
- 4:07pm
- Bugscope Team there are three more eyes called ocelli on the back of the head
- Bugscope Team you can see them now
- Student do insects need heat
Bugscope Team they need some heat to keep them active
- Student this is cool!
Bugscope Team it's fun for us! of course we don't look at bugs all of the time
- Student is the triangular part on the face it's nose?
- Bugscope Team the upside down triangle is a scale from another insect
- Bugscope Team most insects do not have noses; they breathe through their spiracles and smell with chemosensory setae, often in their antennae but sometimes even on their feet
- Student could scope take control
Bugscope Team got it!
- Bugscope Team there are a lot of presets no one has looked at yet
- Bugscope Team please let me know if you are having trouble getting to any of them
- 4:12pm
- Bugscope Team when we use the microscope for Bugscope we purposely keep the sample far from the polepiece, where the electrons come from. if we were closer, we would get better resolution
- Student could we look at the plumose seta
Bugscope Team here comes!
- Bugscope Team that is wild looking
- Bugscope Team you might take the magnification down to see if you can figure out where you are
- Student what are the strands on the body?
Bugscope Team those are microsetae, and they serve a different purpose
- Bugscope Team this is a trapdoor in a Mexican jumping bean
- Bugscope Team actually the door itself is hanging down to the right
- Student is this to trap bugs
Bugscope Team no it is the place where a caterpillar transformed itself into a tiny moth
- Bugscope Team one of the moths is also on the stub today
- Student what is a thermoregulation
Bugscope Team it is keeping your body temperature more or less constant so you don't overheat or get too cold
- 4:18pm
- Bugscope Team bees can kill a large wasp, for example, by crowding around it so that it overheats and dies
- Student why do electron microscopes take close up in black and white?
Bugscope Team we are using electrons rather than light, and the images come to us as signal, as gray scale.
- Bugscope Team the electrons are so small there is no light, just signal. if there is no light there is no color
- Bugscope Team the wavelengths of visible light are about 400 to 700 nanometers, and the electron beam we are using now is about 2.1 nanometers in diameter
- Bugscope Team if we could see the true colors of these samples they would be silver because we coated the specimens with gold-palladium berfore putting them into the 'scope
- Student thanks so much for letting us take turns using the microscope the session is coming to an end
Bugscope Team Thank You!
- Student very cool thanks again bye
- Bugscope Team http://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu/members/2011-166
- Bugscope Team Bye! This below is your member page...
- Student We'll fill out the feedback survey. Thank you very much!! Lisa
- Bugscope Team Thank You, Lisa!
