Matilda's Lab Newsletter #65
This week, the summer ends. We have atomic (and subatomic) photography, living plastics, the scary truth about what is living in your mouth and the self-healing teeth of squid that have no teeth.
There was no post last week, and that wasn’t because nothing happened. If anything, it was the opposite.
What we’ve been up to
The summer holidays are now over, but not before my last couple of days off with the kids. I decided to keep things fairly simple (since the injury I sustained on our last days off together, see newsletter #60, is still very much in the process of healing). So we took a nice, safe, trip to Chester Zoo.
The visit was nice. The penguins were on form, the lemurs we out in force; but something did occur to me. On the way into the zoo, the man who scanned our passes informed us that the boat ride was not operating today. “What boat ride?”, asked Matilda. I realised that we have got into a bit of routine at the Zoo. Chester Zoo is so massive and our visits there are so short that we only ever cover a small part of it. Recently, we appear to keep on covering the same small part of it. Next time, I’m going to take more of a lead and we’ll have to take Nathaniel on the boat ride that he’s never been on… if it’s running.
We couldn’t dally at the zoo, though. I had other plans for the kids. The local shopping park had a dinosaur themed mini-golf set up over the summer. We had been shopping up there the previous day and saw that it was still there, so off we shot for an afternoon of fun. Except, this was the day that the mini-golf ended. The dinosaurs were still there, but they were on the back of fork-lifts, being lifted into wagons. Mercifully, we weren’t too far from another mini-golf place. This was Nathaniel’s first ever time playing and he loved it, even if it sometimes more closely resembled hockey than golf. He got a hole-in-one though, on a hole where neither Matilda nor I managed to, great work little fella!
Having denied the kids a face painting at the zoo, I did let them get face paints out at home. Nathaniel wanted a rainbow butterfly, which allowed Matilda to show off her artistic talents.
What is nice is that the children have loved going back to school. The holidays are fun, but it is nice to get back to a bit of normality again. But just because the holidays are over, it doesn’t mean that the fun has to stop. The next weekend we were off in the caravan, for our last planned trip of the year. This turned out to be a very long day for me as it started at 3.30am on the opposite side of the country. I had to do a hatchery audit for work, and baby birds start hatching very early in the morning. On the plus side, it did give me a chance, the evening before, to explore the city of Lincoln; which is so much nicer than I ever expected that it would be.
Once pitched for our camping weekend with friends, we had a lovely time, with lovely weather. In the day, we had fun on the beach. In the evenings we played games, watch bats and gazed at the dark Snowdonia night sky, commented on just how many Starlink satellites are up there and even saw some real shooting stars.
New Blog content
Regardless of how good an innings somebody has, it’s always sad to hear of their passing. It is nice when this blog can acknowledge any connection that they may have had to the sciences during their time on this Earth.
The map of life has grown again this week, with the addition of the Green Moray Eel.
And this should be the final time that Potential Energy gets mentioned as the newest song. I plan to have a new release for you by the time of the next newsletter.
From the Archive
I’ve been so preoccupied with new content, I’ve only shared one thing from archive in the last 2 weeks:
Science News
The hard thing about quantum physics is that you can’t see things that are as small and as fast as light when the thing that you need to look at them with is light. Now a new microscope has been able to film the motion of electrons.
A new “living plastic” has been developed which self-destructs once it is no longer needed, something that could help battle the ever-growing issue of microplastic contamination.
Squid don’t have teeth. Well, they do have teeth, but they aren’t in their mouth; they’re on their tentacle suckers. And they aren’t made of dentine, they’re made of structural proteins. No one really understands how these teeth are made. Despite that, squid teeth are being considered as a candidate to teach us about self-healing materials because these teeth appear to be living, rather than the dead material in our mouths that can only rot.
Binary fission: the splitting of a single cell to create two new cells is a standard in microbiology, until now. The reason why plaque can grow so quickly on your teeth is because the main bacterial architect of it can perform multiple fission; dividing in up to 14 new cells in 1 go!
Having filmed electrons, it makes taking pictures of atoms sound easy. It really isn’t, but people are getting better at it. The highest resolution image of atoms ever taken has just been released.
Kicking back
Time for some fun now.
There’s a cheeky monkey in the town planning department
Biology = confusing, Language = illogical. Biology + language = …
If you doubt how similar we are to the other apes, watch this
“I’ve been looking for you, Mr. Anderson”. “My. Name. Is. Cottontail!”
This is fun. I appear to have a rather strong green bias.
Please feel free to get in contact with any questions, suggestions or comments either via Substack or at matildaslab@gmail.com.
Please share this with anyone who you think will appreciate it. And remember to share with me any cool sciencey stuff that you find, to make sure that I can pack this newsletter with the best new science content each week.
Until next time, remember that one person’s old news is another’s revelation; so explore. Sometimes it’s not about being the first up the hill. The view’s still going to be breathtaking, no matter how many people have seen it before you.