Monday, July 1, 2024
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Welcome to week five! I’ve talked about how dragonfly’s flight muscles, how they beat their wings and how they produce their incredible colours. Is that enough talking about dragonflies? Never. As you might remember from week one, the veins of a dragonfly’s wings impact their flexibility. Honestly, dragonfly wing patterning might be one of my top five things ever.
Every part of a dragonfly’s wing has a purpose. Every part of it is also beautiful. If you’ve taken a good close look at a dragonfly wing, you might have noticed that it’s crinkly. It has corrugations, or ridges and grooves, that might help with dragonfly aerodynamics. It’s awesome! For me, one of the most interesting things about a dragonfly’s wing is how it changes from the wing base to the wing tip. The thickness of the vein and the membrane is thicker near the base, where the wing is connected to the body, and thinner near the tip. This allows the wing to withstand multiple forces during flight, which makes it more stable. Perhaps even more fascinating is that the size of the vein cavity decreases from the base to the tip. There is more space for body fluid to flow near the body than at the wing tip. This means that the flow velocity is different in different parts of the wing–the fluid flow velocity is higher at the wing base than at the wing tip.
And that’s not where the wonders of the dragonfly wing end! There is nothing I love more than patterns that reach farther than you ever thought they could. The venation in dragonfly wings is a pattern we call the Voronoi tessellation. Voronoi tessellations are a geometric structure that divides a space into chunks based on distance from a set of points called ‘seeds’. Every chunk is an area closer to one specific seed than any other.This is a pattern we see in leaves, garlic cloves, and giraffe print. We also used it to calculate the rainfall of an area, to model muscular tissue, and to find out which old statue some severed statue heads belong to.
Scientists at Brookhaven National Lab have also found the golden angle (a full circle multiplied by the golden ratio to give ~137.5˚) in dragonfly wings. These angles are concentrated in parts of the wing that are thin, but need to be strong and light–the bottom edges and tips of the wings. One perfect angle constant from the ittiest bittiest to the biggest. Fiddleheads and pine cones and seed heads and animal flight patterns, cauliflowers and nautilus shells and galaxies. And dragonflies. All moving in the same spiral. It makes me feel more connected to the world. Yes, I am one person, but there are spirals inside of me that fill up my fingers and toes and organs and bones.
While I love, love, love wing venation. It’s not actually what I worked on this week. Instead, I wrote a demo on the forces involved in flight and how dragonflies glide. I also did lots of AAPT work, creating schedules for the summer meeting and gathering information on STEM schools and how to build professional learning communities. On Wednesday, I met with Karin from AIP News and Media for some tips and tricks on how to film videos for the demos. I’ve never done much video editing, so it’ll be a learning curve! We are also moving along in the actual creation of the SOCK. Materials are being budgeted and Mikayla and I will soon be packing them up!
I started off the fun and delightful things this week by making a quick trip to the Museum of Natural History on Monday afternoon. I heart the insect zoo (obviously) and the Carboniferous dragonfly model is fantastic (I think it could be bigger though). We played Quiplash at Jaden’s in the evening (hilarious, but I’m not very good at it). Tuesday morning Charles and I went to the gym (thank you Charles for teaching me about the gym). Unfortunately, on Wednesday and Thursday, I was home sick, so no fun social activities for this guy. On Friday afternoon, I took the train up to New York to visit my girlfriend. We went to a show (The Welkin, with a friend’s sister and Sandra Oh), ate some good food, went on a bookstore walk, and did some people-watching at NYC Pride! All in all, pretty solid week. Wish I had dreamt about dragonflies more.
Anyways, this week’s dragonfly is Meganeura monyi. It’s not really a dragonfly, but it is a Carboniferous fossil related to the dragonfly. It has no common name, so call it whatever you think is best (or coolest). It had a wingspan of 65–75 cm (2.13–2.46 ft). The holotype, or the specimen used to describe the species, is in the National Museum of Natural History, in Paris.
Maia Chandler