Fly Paper
I know there are a lot of folks who like to review science lit in their blogs. I don't (often) do that because the majority of the people on my flist are not scientists and this would bore the heebeegeebees out of them. Heck...sometimes reading papers bores the heebeegeebees out of me and reiterating what I've read isn't going to make it any more interesting.
However, I was web cruising last night and remembered a paper that I thought would be very amusing to share. The paper has gained great notoriety amongst my fellow grad students. They occasionally ask me about it nearly three years later.
My advisor used to have a subscription to the Journal of Electrostatics, and the project I worked on before the RFID project required that I get to know a lot about ESD (electrostatic discharge). I'm still quite taken with the topic, and, had I stayed here, I would've been delving into the physics of the phenomena quite a bit.
Anyway, I spent a lot of time browsing the back issues of JOE, which overall is a very interesting journal. However, I found a paper that, on it's surface, was very amusing. Someone tested the accumulation of charge on a fly walking along a dielectric (insulator).
Seriously.
(I'm sorry, but I don't plan to link to it as that increases the likelihood that the authors would find this post. It would likely piss them off if they find me mocking their lifes' work.)
Yes, they do have a good reason for doing this: some folks are trying to develop pesticides which work by adhering to the body of an insect. For these to work effectively, they rely on a certain amount of electrostatic potential on the body of the insect. This potential causes the particles of pesticide to become attracted to and stick to the insect. Therefore the higher potential you can build on the insect, the better the pesticide will adhere.
However, even after getting over the initial humor value of the paper (okay...I'm lying...I still think it's freakin' hilarious), I have some serious scientific reservations about the paper. First, they attached foil to the back of the flies that was 1.5 cm by 0.5 cm which was then attached to a probe via a wire. I dunno about you, but it strikes me that either they have huge honkin' flies to work with, or these pieces of foil are about as big as the flies. Let's just turn the things into freakin' lightning rods.
(Imagines little flies dancing around going, "Zap me! Zap me! I'm a huge conductor!")
They noted later on in the article that the foil probably increased the capacitance of the flies, and they may have accumulated more charge than they would have without the foil.
Ya think?!
Then the article was full of statements that struck me as intuitively obvious. For instance, there was the observation that the faster the fly walked, the more charge it seemed to accumulate. Ummm...that's precisely how triboelectric charging works. How is this useful?
There was also the comment that initial charge on the fly seemed to decrease the rate of charging on the fly. My response to that is, "Geez, you've just turned the fly into a huge capacitor. It's going to behave like a capacitor. This is a surprise why?" If you try to fill a pillow with stuffing, the harder you have to work to cram the last bits in and it's going to take you more time. This isn't all that different from trying to cram more electrons onto a little metal plate.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just ornery, but I think the study could have been done a lot better. Perhaps this was very useful because it was the first one to examine this phenomena in detail, but I don't think the results are terribly useful because of the capacitor-filled-with-fly-dielectric issue. (Do you suppose that's marketable? I suppose a follow up study could examine what the breakdown voltage of a fly is and how that compares to ceramic or other types of capacitors. I bet that might qualify as a green product since flies are a renewable resource. Of course, PETA might get mad...and there's all those issues with using animals in research.)
However, I'm glad that someone else took the initiative to actually work on this problem. It's something I've never had the inclination to do because it strikes me as just plain gross. I don't know that I could resist the urge to grab a fly-swatter.
However, I was web cruising last night and remembered a paper that I thought would be very amusing to share. The paper has gained great notoriety amongst my fellow grad students. They occasionally ask me about it nearly three years later.
My advisor used to have a subscription to the Journal of Electrostatics, and the project I worked on before the RFID project required that I get to know a lot about ESD (electrostatic discharge). I'm still quite taken with the topic, and, had I stayed here, I would've been delving into the physics of the phenomena quite a bit.
Anyway, I spent a lot of time browsing the back issues of JOE, which overall is a very interesting journal. However, I found a paper that, on it's surface, was very amusing. Someone tested the accumulation of charge on a fly walking along a dielectric (insulator).
Seriously.
(I'm sorry, but I don't plan to link to it as that increases the likelihood that the authors would find this post. It would likely piss them off if they find me mocking their lifes' work.)
Yes, they do have a good reason for doing this: some folks are trying to develop pesticides which work by adhering to the body of an insect. For these to work effectively, they rely on a certain amount of electrostatic potential on the body of the insect. This potential causes the particles of pesticide to become attracted to and stick to the insect. Therefore the higher potential you can build on the insect, the better the pesticide will adhere.
However, even after getting over the initial humor value of the paper (okay...I'm lying...I still think it's freakin' hilarious), I have some serious scientific reservations about the paper. First, they attached foil to the back of the flies that was 1.5 cm by 0.5 cm which was then attached to a probe via a wire. I dunno about you, but it strikes me that either they have huge honkin' flies to work with, or these pieces of foil are about as big as the flies. Let's just turn the things into freakin' lightning rods.
(Imagines little flies dancing around going, "Zap me! Zap me! I'm a huge conductor!")
They noted later on in the article that the foil probably increased the capacitance of the flies, and they may have accumulated more charge than they would have without the foil.
Ya think?!
Then the article was full of statements that struck me as intuitively obvious. For instance, there was the observation that the faster the fly walked, the more charge it seemed to accumulate. Ummm...that's precisely how triboelectric charging works. How is this useful?
There was also the comment that initial charge on the fly seemed to decrease the rate of charging on the fly. My response to that is, "Geez, you've just turned the fly into a huge capacitor. It's going to behave like a capacitor. This is a surprise why?" If you try to fill a pillow with stuffing, the harder you have to work to cram the last bits in and it's going to take you more time. This isn't all that different from trying to cram more electrons onto a little metal plate.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just ornery, but I think the study could have been done a lot better. Perhaps this was very useful because it was the first one to examine this phenomena in detail, but I don't think the results are terribly useful because of the capacitor-filled-with-fly-dielectric issue. (Do you suppose that's marketable? I suppose a follow up study could examine what the breakdown voltage of a fly is and how that compares to ceramic or other types of capacitors. I bet that might qualify as a green product since flies are a renewable resource. Of course, PETA might get mad...and there's all those issues with using animals in research.)
However, I'm glad that someone else took the initiative to actually work on this problem. It's something I've never had the inclination to do because it strikes me as just plain gross. I don't know that I could resist the urge to grab a fly-swatter.