Tag: Biology

Ants can be fun, industrious, zero-maintenance pets that you can leave home alone. And their patterns of behavior are just fascinating. The AntWorks gel farm was developed by NASA to survive Space Shuttle launches (sand would shift and crush the ants under many G’s).  They wanted to study tunnel formation in microgravity.  The gel does […]

No not the plastic mail-order kind. The heavy-duty scientific versions — the same type of elaborate set-ups that entomologists construct as ant terrariums in their labs. These scientists must keep ants alive for years in order to study them. There’s nothing bummer for a scientist — or a kid — than a dead ant farm. […]

[ Crossposted from Wired Science: Thomas Goetz writes about his own Science Fair experience, which provided an invaluable childhood lesson in the importance of representative samples –CA] Trolling through Google news, it became apparent to me that it’s Science Fair season… in Illinois and Vermont and Kentucky and everywhere else in the US and Canada. […]

Here’s a neat trick I picked up from a great book for kid naturalists published by National Geographic. In The Amateur Naturalist, author Nick Baker suggests using a can of spray paint to collect a spider web. Spiders will often spin a new web each day so collecting their webs dosen’t harm the spider. Just […]