Plants with feelings?

Every time we caress a plant, channels sensitive for distension are sending an electric signal to induce the production of plant's building blocks lignin and cellulose. Within twenty minutes after the first caress, the plant hormone ethylene drips out of the pores, stimulating plant cells and regulating plant growth. For chamber plants our attention could be a welcome substitute for the daily natural stimulants they would get in open nature by the wind. The increased sensitivity of chamber plants for vibration could even be broadened to stimulation due to sound and speech: when talking, the produced high frequencies and to a higher extent the produced carbon dioxide could enhance plant's changes of survival. Cleve Backster, a former Interrogation Specialist with the CIA, conducted controversial experiments by applying his “lie detector” on plants, which made him believe that plants are actually sentient and are even able to communicate with other life forms. This theory of “primary perception” is however largely regarded as a pseudoscience due to the very low reproducibility of the experiments and the lack of real scientific evidence.

Bart Vandenbossche

Gene-for-gene relationship

The concept of gene-for-gene co-evolution is a major model for research on the evolution of resistance against parasites in crop plants, reciprocal evolution between species in natural plant populations, and mathematical models of the dynamics of co-evolution. Harold H. Flor discovered this relationship which suggested that for each gene conditioning resistance in the host, there was a corresponding gene conditioning pathogenicity and his study allowed him to deduce what is popularly known as the gene-for-gene hypothesis. His interpretation of host-parasite genetic interaction has proven to be a critically important paradigm in plant pathology and of extraordinary utility in the breeding of disease resistant cultivars. Flor extensively used this his hypothesis and explained genetic relationships in different rusts and in other diseases, as well as in diverse symbiotic relationships such as plants and herbivorous insects. Recent studies have begun to challenge the prevailing view that natural selection within local plant populations is the major evolutionary process driving this form of co-evolution. The emerging pattern from these studies suggests that metapopulation structure, including the effects of gene flow and genetic drift, may be at least as important as local natural selection in determining the genetic dynamics and outcomes of these evolutionary arms races.

Patrick Mawuenyegan Norshie

The Secret Life of Honeybees

Have you ever wondered how honeybees navigate their way and return to the hive after rambling flight in pursuit of food? You will be surprised when you find out some of the fascinating things that bee biologists, entomologists and botanists have found about the secret life of the bees and their world. These crucial part of wildlife communities appeared to be an automatic pilot; they measure distance traveled using the flow of images of the ground across their retinas. They are also able to orient themselves according to the sun’s angle in the sky to make their return journeys. This ability is because of their five spectacular eyes that are capable to capture light rays from a small angle of view. So whenever you see a honeybee don’t think that it got lost.

Negin Ebrahimi

Agroforestry- Malawi’s Journey towards Sustainable Development

Agroforestry seems to be the answer to the Malawi nation´s concerns over environmental degradation as it provides and meets human needs without destroying and degrading natural resources but at the same time conserving it. According to International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (1984), Agroforestry is a collective term for all land use practices and systems in which woody perennials are grown on the same land management unit as annual crops or/and animals. In this system, the woody perennials provide the unit with biomass which reduces raindrop impact, provides fodder and soil nutrients through biomass decomposition. It also protects the soil from erosion through the soil binding effect. The animals provide the farm with milk, meat, faecal manure and also farm power thus reducing farm costs and nutritional problems in the farm. Lastly, the crops also provide the farm with food, cash after crop sales and also play a role in nutrient cycling.

Rachel Isabel Mkandawire

Red Hot Chili Pepper

Some people like sweet food, others like sour food, but there are few who like hot food. The feeling of your mouth being on fire when you eat hot food, like chili peppers, is caused by the chemical Capsaicin. This product interacts with sensory neurons: it binds to a specific receptor, which doesn't cause an actual burn, but only the feeling of one. This is why the compound is used in pepperspray.
Even if you try to extinguish with water, the burning sensation remains, because Capsaicin is insoluable in water. But the chemical also has an advantage: as it binds to a neuron receptor, it can ease the pain of cancer patients.

Dries Van den Bossche

The adventures of Le Gentil

The next time you’re complaining that your experiment isn’t going at will you might better think of what Guillaume Le Gentil had to go through. Le Gentil was an astronomer who wanted to see the transit of Venus at different places on earth to measure its distance to the sun. Unfortunately, on the day of the transit it was impossible to make any measurements, he was stuck on a ship to India. He had run late due to a war between France and the United Kingdom, but having come this far he decided he would wait there eight years to see the next transit. Yet, this time he was prevented from taking any measurements because of the clouds. Because the next transit would occur in a century, he went home without any results; back home, he found out he had been declared dead, his wife had remarried and his family had sold his property.

Babs Lemmens

The Gravitational Force

It’s not a magic, it’s not an illusion, it’s not a myth, the gravitational force is there. Think of rain drops, falling plant leaves, falling fruits from a tree, a falling beer bottle from a table, a gun shot , a parachute etc, has anyone ever asked why, the leaves, the fruits , the bottle and the parachute always come down towards the earth? Sir Isac Newton explained this amusing unseen phenomenon. There is always a force, the gravitational force, which pulls everything on the earth torwards itself. The `mean` force. This force is located at the centre of the earth.

Njira Njira

What is the smelliest chemical?

Officially a stink-o-meter does not exist, but most people would choose one of the following substances containing sulfur as foulest smelling chemical: ethyl mercaptan (C2H5SH) or butyl seleno-mercaptan (C4H9SeH).
The first one is a thiol which smells like rotten onions and cabbage and like it has been drenched in sewer gasses. Therefore it should not be a surprise that this man-made molecule is easily and rapidly recognised and causes headaches, nausea and several damages to vital organs when inhaled.
The second one is produced by skunks and has a scent so penetrating that it is listed as the smelliest natural product in existence in the Guinness Book of World Records, smelling of rotten eggs, garlic and burnt rubber. If that is not bad enough, the spray can cause irritation and in some cases temporary blindness and can be detected by a human nose up to a mile downwind.
If you know of a molecule that smells even worse, you should check it out and let me know what is so stinky about it!

Michel De Keersmaecker

Experimental Diabetes

Do you know diabetes can be induced in rats for experimental purposes? Surprised? Diabetes mellitus, also known as type 2 diabetes or insulin dependent diabetes can be induced in a rat by depriving the rat of food for 12 hours, then injecting it with a dose of streptozotocin just under its skin. The blood sugar (glycemic) level of the rat is then tested 48 hours after its injection with streptozotocin. A hyperglycemic level, that is a blood glucose level greater than 140 mg/dl, implies the rat is diabetic. The rat can then be used for experimental purposes.

Kahpui Mariama

Evolution: Changing our Perspective of our World

Charles Darwin, being a keen observer of nature, changed our understanding of the living world by his deduction: “every living thing shares a common ancestor”.Darwin looked intently at life. Interestingly, he noted that, while several organisms were just slightly different from each other, they were equally perfectly adapted to their environment. These and several other observations made him curious to search for answers and therefore resulted in the underlying principle of modern biology; the theory of evolution. This theory enables us to analyse our genes and fight with viruses, and to realize the fossil record of the earth and its biodiversity.
Darwin looked intently-and we saw the world in a new way.

Olorunleke Feyisara Eyiwumi

the Student’s T-test

It is well known wherefore the Student’s T-test is used for, but do you also know where it got its name from? Generally, when someone makes a discovery of something, he or she has the opportunity to give it a name and most of the time they just name it after themselves. The Student’s T-test was originally first invented and used by William Sealy Gosset who was a statistician employed in the brewing company Guinness. Because of previous events, Guinness was forced to prohibit his employers from publishing their discoveries and papers. Therefore Gosset had the idea to publish his paper under the name of his pseudonym Student. So instead of the name Gosset’s T-Test, it got the name Student’s T-Test.

Cantaert Bram

Volcanoes: The disaster that has to strike

As we all know by now with all the hoopla about global warming these days carbondioxide keeps the heat of the sun in our atmosphere. The carbondioxide level in our atmosphere is regulated by an interaction between plankton and volcanoes. The plankton acts like the amazon forest of the ocean and so it reduces the carbondioxide level. Once the plankton dies it sinks to the bottom of the ocean where the dead plankton is covered by sand. After millions of years the layers, in which the dead plankton is stored, will be moved under an active volcanoe, due to movement of the tectonic plates, and all the carbondioxide stored by the plankton will be released into our atmosphere and so it keeps the level of carbondioxide constant. So the next time a religious fool says to you that god let a volcanoe explode to punish us for our sins, you can now say “no Mother Nature is responsible for this disaster in order to keep our planet livable”.

Timoty De Cleyn

AIDS

AIDS or known as Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is defined as a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus(HIV) in humans and similar viruses in other species (SIV, FIV, etc.). Many people in the world are suffering from this fatal disease. During the late stage of this condition, the individuals become susceptible to the infections and tumors. There is no cure for AIDS. The virus causing this disease is transmitted through direct contact of a mucous membrane or the blood stream with a bodily fluid containing HIV, such as blood, semen, vaginal fluid and breast milk. The ways of transmission include anal, vaginal or oral sex, blood transfusion, contaminated hypodermic needles, exchange between mother and baby during pregnancy, childbirth or breast feeding or other exposure to one of the above bodily fluids.

Muhammad Aslam

The Dreamer

Can you belief that the most revolutionary findings in the world as the effect of dreamed? The most revolutionary findings in chemistry were the discovery of the structure of the Benzene molecule and the structure theory of molecules as the effect of dreamed by chemist ‘Friedrich August Kekule’. He worked for years to discover the atomic structure of benzene. One night he dreamed that many snakes flitting in the floor, then they united into a ring of six snakes follow each other’s tails, spun around in a circle. It induced him to propose the atomic structure of benzene as a hexagonal closed six carbon ring. If you are a good dreamer, then you can solve any problem and become a scientist.

Thurkathipana Navaneethan

The "Father of Radio"

Marconi was born on April 25, 1874 and died on July 20, 1937. He was considered to be the father of radio and his achievement was to produce and detect the waves over long distances, laying the foundations for what we called it now, the radio. Radio waves were known as '' Hertizan Waves '' when Marconi started his experiments in his villa attics, following Hertz's way. Hertizan waves were produced by sparks in one circuit and detected in another circuit a few meters away, but Marconi soon detects signals over several kilometers. With the help of the Chief-Engineer of the British Post Office, he had a chance to make demonstrations in London, and then he obtained a patent and founded the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company Limited. That company opened the world's first radio factory at Chelmsford, England in 1898 which still bears his name.




Cho Cho Htay

The "Fiery Serpent"

One of the most influencial nematodes of ancient times are most certainly Dracunculus medinensis also known as the Guinea worm. The Guinea worm belongs to the order Spirurida, can grow up to 800mm's long and mostly parisitise on animals or humans. In The Bible (1250 B.C., Numbers 6:9) Moses refers to it as the "fiery serpent" that caused many deaths among the Israelites. Patients was treated by cutting a slit into the path of the worm that crawled just beneath the skin surface and carefully wound around a stick until the pest was entirely removed. This type of infection was so common that physicians advertised their services with pictures depicting a worm around a stick. Even today this emblem is still closely associated with medical institutes.

Magdalena Boshoff

Laws are made to be broken

“Laws are made to be broken ...” most people agree. But mostly they can not overcome the law of gravity, founded by Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Upon seeing an apple falling from a tree, Newton realised that the same thing that caused the apple to fall, was what held the moon and the sun in the orbit: a new universal law was born. In 1687 the English physician published his famous Principia, which hypothesize the inverse-square law of gravity that forms the basis of modern engineering. It says that the gravitational attraction between two massive objects is inversly proportional to the square of their seperation distance. Unfortunately, upon this day Newton and other great scientist were not capable to explain the cause of this force.

Joke

"The father of atomic bomb in China"

“I always believe I can come back to my motherland, today, I am here!” the Chinese scientist and rocket expert Qian xuesen said to his families when the airplane was landing in Guangzhou,China.
Qian xuesen, who got his doctor degree at MIT in astronautics in 1939 and had been working in the USA for 20 years in rocket research. In 1949, New China was founded, he thought it was the time to go back, but a senior naval captain of the USA said ”No matter where he is, he is worth 5 divisions, anyway, he must stay in the USA “,so he was subject to supervision by the Federal Bureau of Investigation until he left in 1955.
After coming back, he plotted out the idea for developing missile technology in China. On 29 June, 1964, the first domestically developed medium-range missile was successfully launched, two years later, 27 October, 1966, the atomic bomb was accomplished.
Now, he is retired, but the Chinese people have never forgotten him, we respectfully call him as “the father of atomic bomb in China”

Jihongli

USA 193

American spy satellite, USA 193 was launched in December 14, 2006. The satellite was launched successfully into the space but failed to function a year before. The satellite carried hydrazine which is a hazardous toxic gas which can pose potential risks to humans once entered to the earth surface. The US Navy launched the SM-S missile to completely destroy the satellite that was coming to closer to the earth atmosphere. On the 20^th of February, 2008, the satellite destruction was successfully done which used interesting physics applications. This initiative has raised controversy from other countries regarding the mission since the final fate of the debris is not known.

Erwin Jamilo Galon

The Super Model

Nematodes are microscopic worms which occur in all habitats as free-living and parasites of human, plants and animals. The terrestrial free living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, feeding on bacteria because of its good characters as a model organism got the title as the super model. Nematodes got more attention by the public after survival of the super model which was sent by NASA from the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in February 2003. The super model is also reached the news because it was the first multicellular animal of which entire genome was sequenced in 1998. It is a favored model organism for aging study. The supermodel is now on show in Nematolgoy laboratory and those who are afraid of aging are contacting Prof. Braeckman in Ledeganck to get information how far the research has gone and to know their chance.

Temesgen Addis Desta

E = m.c²

E = mc² is an equation that is known all over the world. Though most people know that this equation was derived by Albert Einstein, only few can give a good explanation of what it is about. The equation, which is also known as the mass-energy equivalence, states that the energy is equal to the mass times the speed of light squared.
According to the mass-energy equivalence, a small amount of mass can be converted into a huge amount of energy and vice versa. Einstein published the mass-energy equivalence in 1907, but it took until 1932 before an experiment was performed that could verify the equation.
The development of the atomic bomb is only one of the applications where the mass-energy equivalence has been used.

Mike De Vrieze

Contamination

Wearing gloves apparently isn’t enough to oppose contamination.

One day, a palynologist was looking at some old (Palaeozoic) pollen samples, but his results turned out to be very inaccurate. His pollen were of a kind that didn’t exist yet in the Palaeozoic. The problem puzzled him and some colleagues for some time. When identifying the pollen, they found that the species was exactly the kind the palynologist had in his garden. Turns out he had been climbing his tree that morning and the pollen fell from his hair into the Palaeozoic samples.

Fun Meeuws

Muse

What Laura signified for Petrach and his sonnets, a Viennese girl meant for Erwin Schrödinger and his world famous wave equation .

A few days before Christmas 1925, ladies’ man and one of the world’s most brilliant physicists Erwin Schrödinger took off for a vacation in a villa in the Swiss Alps. His mission was to discover a predominating equation which defines, solves and predicts any quantum mechanic system. The essential parts that led up to accomplishing this mission were: leaving his wife at home, replacing her by a Viennese girlfriend and taking along de Broglie’s thesis and two pearls. Once in the villa it only took Schrödinger to plug a pearl in each ear to filter out distracting noises and to have the mesmerizing girl in his bed for inspiration, to come to the great discovery of the following equation : Hy = Ey.

It’s just a pity that the girl’s identity remained a mystery up until now, who knows what she could have meant for cancer-researching-scientists … ?

Pieter-Jan Sabbe

Let's take a flying carpet.

Our childhood dreams from One Thousand and One Nights are one step closer to becoming reality.

Scientists just discovered that a small carpet with a length of 10 centimetres and a thickness of 0.1 millimetres can float above the ground in a fluid if it vibrates at about 10 hertz (10 waves per second). It would even be possible for the carpet to move. The rippling produces a high-pressure area underneath the carpet which lifts it. It’s not possible yet to make a human-sized carpet, because more powerful vibrations would be needed.

Maybe one day our children have a new and interesting way of going to school, all thanks to aerodynamics!

Inge Lindemann
source: Eos, february 2008, page 23

Koopmans' theorem

In quantum chemistry, the science which goal is to solve the Schrödinger equation, there are lots of theories. All approximations but none of them give the exact solution without having other unknowns. One of the theories, the Koopmans’ theorem, describes the difference in energy of a molecule using the Hartree-Fock method and the orbital energies. Difficult to understand, even if you had a quantum chemistry course. But T.C. Koopman, who invented the theory, was an economist, he even won the noble prize in economics. Quantum chemistry (the Koopmans’ theorem) was his hobby.

Veerle Devulder

experiment

In chemistry, you have to follow strict rules and certainly no monkey business. Although every year there are some students who won’t go with the herd. Lately I’ve heard a story about three students who had made their own bomb, using chemical products from the laboratory. They had mixed all these products together, resulting in an unstable substance. Eventually at the end of the year, one of them threw it in a sink but unfortunately for him, it exploded in his face. Luckily for him, he didn’t get severe injuries and he took a great lesson from his experiment!

Duchan Laplace