An old song may have a new answer. The song is Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The answer, maybe, is suggested by the new study: “Dandelion-Picking Legged Robot,” Sandilya Sai Garimella and Shai Revzen, arXiv:2112.05383, 2021. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of […]
Tag: flower
What is the electrical charge of a bumblebee? [study]
The idea that flying insects might be naturally electrified – and that electric charges could be a significant factor in the pollination of plants – goes back nearly a century. (ref. Heuschmann, O. (1929), Über die elektrischen Eigenschaften der Insekten Haare, Journal of Comparative Physiology A: Neuroethology, Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology, 10(4), 594- 664.) […]
Bees also like (paintings of) sunflowers (study)
“Flower colours have evolved over 100 million years to address the colour vision of their bee pollinators.” With this in mind, investigators Professor Lars Chittka and Julian Walker of Queen Mary College, University of London, decided to investigate whether bees might also be attracted to paintings of flowers – for example (a copy of) Van Gogh’s […]