{"id":973,"date":"2002-06-17T08:33:47","date_gmt":"2002-06-17T12:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=973"},"modified":"2002-06-17T08:33:47","modified_gmt":"2002-06-17T12:33:47","slug":"taking-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=973","title":{"rendered":"taking flight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We travelled yesterday to the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, to look at some of the work being done by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.darwinwars.com\/cuts\/gdn\/helen_gilbart_4op.html\">Helen<\/a> Gilbart, a painter currently working in the Geological <a href=\"http:\/\/www.esc.cam.ac.uk\/new\/v10\/museum\/redevelopment\/latest.html#art\">museum<\/a> in Cambridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nThis latest work is wonderful. I thought she&#8217;s trying to do the same sort of thing as I am doing with the worm book: to discover and redisplay the refreshing strangeness of biology.<\/p>\n\n<p>I ought really to ask her to do the cover of the worm book but I doubt the publishers will spring for it.<\/p>\n\n<p>There were a couple of guys from the museum in her studio too, and we talked about how dragonflies manage to be so large. It&#8217;s not obvious: since they are insects, they don&#8217;t have hearts, or blood, to move oxygen around their bodies. The oxygen must all diffuse to their muscles from the skin, and large flying insects are going to need a lot of oxygen. So the existence of huge dragonflies does make a small mystery. One answer turns out to be that they don&#8217;t have to contract their muscles once for every time their wings flap, as birds must do. A dragonfly&#8217;s wings are connected to the thorax in some way that makes them oscillate several times for every muscle contraction. I didn&#8217;t understand the details. What matters is that they need fewer muscle contractions, and thus less oxygen, than an equivalent bird would do.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We travelled yesterday to the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, to look at some of the work being done by Helen Gilbart, a painter currently working in the Geological museum in Cambridge. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=973\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}