Bugs - did you know

• It is estimated that there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects alive at any one time. That’s about 1,500 million insect for ever person alive. There are 10,000 kinds of ants alone

• The first organisms to succeed in flight were insects about 300 million years ago and these were dragonflies with wingspans of 70cm

• The female green spoonworm is 7,500 times larger than the male making reproduction very difficult however they solve it by the female swallowing the male and he travels the length of her body until he reaches her sex organs where he fertilizes her and then continues to live in her body

Egg - rated Facts• 1 egg at a time laid by the kiwi and in comparison

with its mother is ¼ the size of its parent (the largest relative size for any bird)

• 1 egg from an ostrich weighs 1.65kg (more than 30 times heavier than a hens egg), is 20cm long and in comparison with its mother is 1/70 the size of its parent (the smallest relative size for any bird)

• 30+ eggs laid at a time by the blue tit and ducks like the pochard and muscovy (the most for birds)

• 1000 eggs laid in one season by the green turtle in six to seven clutches of 100-150 eggs each

• 20-million tiny eggs are cast into the sea by fish like the cod and ling

Deep divers

• Diving deep for food but having to return to the surface for breaths of air the following mammals are well adapted for deep diving:

– 600-metres weddell seal

– 700-metres elephant seal

– 1000-metres killer whale

– 2000-metres bottlenose whale

– 3000+ metres sperm whale

Organ grinding• 5 grams the weight of dead skin cells shed by the

human adult each day

• 25% the amount of oxygen taken in by the body that is used by the brain

• 400ml is the storage capacity of the average human bladder

• 2000litres of blood filtered by your kidneys each day

• 250 million litres of blood is pumped through the human heart during an average human lifetime

• 300 million tiny air sacs can be found in your lungs for gas exchange

Batty Gross but Grateful

• Midsummer, a muggy night we sleep fitfully and frequently wake with the sheets thrown on the floor and our limbs showing the signs of a mosquitoes banquet.

• What this could mean is there is a lack of bats around the area since the average bat will eat between 3,000 and 7,000 mosquitoes in a night i.e. an average of 600 an hour. So a colony of 500 bats would gorge on 250,000 mosquitoes

• Bats are a protected species

Chemist Loses his Head

• Lavoisier the French chemist (1743-94) was beheaded on the guillotine and observers stated he continued to blink for 15 seconds after decapitation. This could be a reflex reaction or it could be consciousness there is no way of knowing.

• However in 1905 Dr Beaurieux experimented with the head of the murderer Languille. He observed that after decapitation:– The eyelid and lips worked in irregular rhythmic

contractions for 5-6 seconds. After several seconds after they had stopped the face relaxed and the eyelids closed. He then shouted in a loud voice “Languille!” The eyelids lifted without any spasmodic contractions and Languille’s eyes fixed themselves on Beaurieux’s and the pupils focused. After several seconds the eyelids closed again slowly and evenly. Beaurieux repeated the shout and the reaction occurred again but not a third time. The whole process took 25 – 30 seconds

• However it is assumed that consciousness would be lost in 2 – 3 seconds due to the heavy loss of blood

Smelly Element

• Sulfur has been used in medicine as far back as prehistoric times and has been prescribed for 3,000 years as a popular remedy for digestive disorders. Often mixed with sweet honey or treacle to form a laxative. The sulfur is converted to alkali sulfides in the intestine which then acts as an irritant. It was used in ointments mixed with wool fat to treat acne, scabies and parasite infections. These are no longer used but sulfur is found in penicillin which is a natural sulfur compound.

• Halitosis is caused by three molecules, sulfur derivatives – hydrogen sulfide H2S, methyl mercaptan CH3SH and dimethyl sulfide (CH3)2S. We can detect 5 micrograms per litre of air of hydrogen sulfide, detect methyl mercaptan at 0.02 micrograms per litre of air and dimethyl sulfide at 1 microgram per litre

Glassy Element

• Silicon is essential to diatoms and sponges who use it to make their skeletons.

• Nettle stingers are pure hollow needles of silicon• Silicon is important for bone growth in chickens, rats

and humans and for development of connective tissue and skin and makes up approximately 1 gram of the body weight. When used on burns as silicone gel it speeds up the body’s ability to replace scar tissue.

• Silicon in the form of silica gave humans their first tools; sharp flint tools. Melting fine sand with other chemicals produced glass.

• Lavoisier classified silica as an element because of its inertness but Humphry Davy classified it as a compound but with no evidence to justify that. It was not until 1824 that Jöns Jacob Berzelius isolated it

The Pale Horse – Agatha Christie

• Around 2 micrograms of Thallium is absorbed a day by the average human body in the diet and through the skin. It accumulates in the kidneys and liver and is a toxic heavy metal

• Thallium mimics potassium and has the same size and ionic charge as a potassium ion. Because of this it affects potassium activated enzymes in the brain, muscles and skin.

• The body attempts to get rid of thallium by excreting it into the intestines but here the body mistakes thallium for potassium and reabsorbs it.

• 1970 German pharmacologist Horst Heydlauf discovers Prussian Blue, the dye in blue ink, exchanges its potassium for thallium and holds on to it more strongly and takes it out of the body

• Agatha Christie wrote about thallium poisoning in The Pale Horse. The Iraqi regime in the 1980/90s used thallium sulfate to dispose of its enemies, who appeared to die of natural causes

Natural Gas Factories

• Flatulence along with eructation is how the body gets rid of gas and are respectively known colloquially as farting and burping

• A burp consists mostly of air taken in when eating and released from the stomach; while a fart is mostly methane with other gases produced by bacteria in the gut

• Methane produced in this way is one of the main gases causing global warming. The animal that produces the most methane in this way are termites

• 1/4litre is the amount of gas produced and expelled by the average human being per day

• 400litres the amount of methane produced by a cow per day

• There are approximately 500 different types of bacteria in the human digestive system helping to produce the gas expelled by the body

Massive atoms

• The heaviest atom found in any significant amounts in nature is the isotope Uranium 238 (238U) but this is not the largest.

• 238U has an atomic radius of around 154pm• Caesium (Cs) has an atomic radius of 272pm,

Rubidium (Rb) has a radius of 250pm, Potassium (K) 235pm, Barium (Ba) 224pm and Strontium (Sr) 215pm. All metals and to the bottom of Groups 1 and 2 (the alkali and alkali earths)

• The lightest atom found in any significant amounts in nature is Hydrogen (H) and it also has the smallest atomic radius at 37pm

• If the nucleus of an atom was the size of a cherry then it would take a building the size of large cathedral to contain it.

Bound by Forces• Molecules are held together by chemical bonds. In general

the longer the bond distance the weaker the bond while the shorter the bond then generally the stronger the bond but where metals are concerned this is not always true

• The longest bond ever measured in a molecule was in the molecule of He-He had an average length over time of 6200pm but it is not stable under normal conditions

• The longest bonds are often found in complex chemicals and for that reason Thallium probably makes the longest bond in two chemical complexes where the distances are 376, 399.8 and 462.5pm

• The shortest bond is found in Hydrogen between an atom of Hydrogen and an atom of Deuterium H-D which has a length of 74.136pm while those in a molecule of Deuterium D-D are 74.164pm

• The strongest bond between two homoatomic atoms is in Nitrogen N2 with a breaking or dissociation energy of 945.3kJper mol.

• The strongest bond between two heteroatomic atoms is in Carbon Monoxide CO with a breaking of dissociation energy of 1070.3 kJ per mol