URN

Insect compound eyes and antennae
It's the middle of summer and you're sat outside at your BBQ with a cold can of cider loving life right now ... until you take your next drink and get stung on your tongue by THAT BLOODY WASP THAT WON'T LEAVE YOU ALONE. Ok, so that hasn't happened to me, but it could...

Found on every continent, and even under the ocean, insects are everywhere around us whether we like it or not. It is estimated there are up to 10 million species of insect alive today on planet Earth.

Insects are part of the Arthropod phylum, and as such have an external skeleton and jointed limbs. All insects have six legs, and are the only type of invertebrate which has evolved the ability to fly.

Today's guest is Dr. Francis Gilbert is particularly interested in the evolution of life histories and mimicry in insects. We will be talking about mimicry in insects, insect-plant relations and conservation.

Tune in to find out more!

Natural Selection

This is competition between those within a species rather than competition between species. This is one reason trees grow so large, the taller ones gather the most light and convert the most energy and are the strongest, this leads to them surviving longest.

Mimicry

Today our guest is Meghan Gray and we're talking about Gravitational Lensing and Dark Matter. The universe is a pretty large place. Astronomers believe that the observable universe is a sphere, which measures 92 billion light years across. A light year is the distance light can travel in a year, which is roughly 6 trillion miles.

It is gravity, which governs the structure of the universe. Stars form into groups which orbit around a large mass in the middle – a bit like our atom. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years in diameter.

Believed to be within all galaxies is a halo of a substance known as dark matter. This substance is incredibly dense and accounts for 80% of the matter in a galaxy.

Gravitational Lensing However we have no idea where it came from or indeed what it looks like, as it doesn’t interact in ways like normal matter does, however we can passively detect dark from the effects it has on light and especially gravity.

A gravitational lens refers to a distribution of matter (such as a cluster of galaxies) between a distant source (a background galaxy) and an observer, that is capable of bending or lensing the light from the source, as it travels towards the observer.