Tag Archives: Royal Society

Fields of flowers

6 Replies

It’s not often that someone presents you with a completely new way of looking at the world around us but that’s what Dr Gregory Sutton did a few weeks ago at a Royal Society Regional Networking Event in Bristol where he is a University Research Fellow funded by the Royal Society. He told us that every flower is a conductor sticking out of the ground which on a sunny day has an electric field around it of the order of 100 volts per metre. Bees can identify the type of flower that they are approaching based on the interaction between this field and the electrostatic field generated around them as they fly. Bees are covered in tiny hairs and he believes that they use these to sense the electric field around them. The next research question that he is tackling is how bees are affected by the anthropogenic electric fields from power lines, mobile phones etc.

The plots of the electric field around a flower really caught my attention. You can see one in the thumbnail photo. I walked across Brandon Hill in Bristol after the talk to meet a former PhD student for dinner. I kept stopping on the way to try to detect this field with the hairs on the back of my hand. It was a beautiful sunny day but I was not sensitive enough to feel anything. Or maybe I was sensing it but my brain is not programmed to recognise the sensation. We discussed it over dinner and marvelled at the bees’ ability to process the information from its multiple sensors in the light of our knowledge of the computing power required to handle what it is fashionable to call ‘Big Data’ from man-made sensors.

Once again Nature humbles us with its ingenuity and makes our efforts look clumsy if not feeble. Dr Sutton’s insights have given me a whole new way to attempt to connect with Nature while I am on deep vacation.

Sorry about the pun in the title. I couldn’t resist it.

Source:

Clarke D, Whitney H, Sutton G & Robert D, Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebee, Science, 5 April 2013: 66-69. [DOI:10.1126/science.1230883].

Limitless energy

1 Reply

neil hunterThe Sun supplies approximately 100,000 TeraWatts (TW) of energy to the Earth continuously. To put this into perspective the entire generating capacity of China is 1TW and the global population as a whole uses 15TW. Plants use about 100TW via photosynthesis. Most our energy consumption is derived from biomass created millions of years ago by photosynthesis and stored as coal, gas or oil when the plant died and was crushed by geological processes.

I am stealing and paraphrasing from Professor Neil Hunter’s presentation at the Royal Society’s Scientific Discussion Meeting on Bio-inspiration for New Technologies. Of course, as Neil pointed out, the energy from the Sun arrives across a range of wavelengths some of which are damaging to our health. So fortunately for us the Earth’s atmosphere filters out a number of wavelengths but nevertheless a broad band of wavelengths still arrives at the Earth’s surface. Photosynthesis only makes use of two relatively narrowbands of light….

Mankind’s efforts to use solar energy look pathetic alongside Nature’s performance and should be humbling to any engineer or scientist. But it is also an inspiration to do better. We need cheap clean energy for everyone. It is being delivered everyday but we don’t know how to use it.