Welsh Journals

Society, Gwent Trust for Nature Conservation, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (S. W. & Wales), Somerset Trust for Nature Conservation, Wildfowl Trust. The brain of the bee In 1985 Dr. Robert Pickard of the Department of Zoology at University College, Cardiff, gave an invited exhibition at the Royal Society's annual Conversazione in London. The exhibition displayed the results of a 5-year-effort to produce a computerised atlas of the honeybee brain. His co-workers included Miss Helen Cole, Mr. Stuart France, Miss Pamela Johnson and Dr. Patricia Joseph. To produce the atlas, serial histological sections through bee brains were photographed and the different cellular zones were digitised in 1000 cubic micrometer blocks. A computer database that represents a 3-D model of the brain was then constructed. Multi-coloured sections in different planes can be generated by software on the SERC interactive graphics terminals, currently housed in the College's engineering complex at Newport Road. The atlas will be used to determine the recording sites of tiny printed circuits that can monitor electrical activity in the thinking bee. These circuits, the first in Europe to directly interface electronic chips with brain cells for recording purposes, were produced by Dr. Pickard and Dr. Richard Welberry of the Physics Department in 1973. The electronic work in the Bee Research Unit continues to develop with the support of the Science and Engineering Research Council, which awarded a further grant of £ 21,663 to the College in May. The latest circuits being made by Dr. Pickard and Dr. Peter Wall are designed on computers at Cardiff, converted to printing masks by electron beam lithography at the Rutherford Laboratory in Oxford and then moved to the Micro-electronics Department at Southampton University for the first stages of fabrication. In the future, minute printed circuits similar to those developed for the bee brain study, will be used as prosthetic devices in medicine and biological sensors in agriculture and biotechnology. Dinosaurs from China From December 1986 to April 1988 the Geology Galleries and a major part of the Botany Gallery of the National Museum of Wales are taken over completely by the largest exhibition of dinosaurs ever seen in Britain. Centred on a number of large, spectacular dinosaur skeletons from China, the exhibition explains when these fascinating creatures lived on Earth, where they lived, how they lived, how they moved, what they ate, and how they were related to other groups of reptiles. The sudden extinction of dinosaurs will form a special topic within the exhibition, together with displays of the varied forms of life that lived in the water at the time when dinosaurs lived on land. Six very large, free standing skeletons are 'stars' of the show, including Mamenchisaurus, which at 22 m (72 ft) long is the biggest animal ever found in Asia. Flying reptiles, fossil eggs, footprints and numerous other bones and skeletons help to illustrate a unique period in the evolution of life between 220 million and 65 million years ago. There is an admission charge for this exhibition: adults £ 1.50, children and senior citizens 80p. The Museum is closed all day on Mondays. The Chernobyl disaster The massive radioactive leak at the Chernobyl nuclear power station and the huge radioactive cloud that it generated and that moved across a major part of Central Europe, bring the hazards of nuclear fall-out to the forefront of public consciousness in Britain to a greater extent than any single event since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Following the disaster, the Meterological Office and the National Radiological Protection Board prepare a series of maps showing how different parts of Britain were affected day by day between May 2 and May 8-when the cloud crossed and recrossed the country. For the first four days the cloud moved in a generally south-westwards direction across Europe before turning north to cross Britain. Then, when it seemed to be on its way out across the Atlantic, it doubled back to deliver a second fall-out of material affecting the north-western part of the country. The maps are a record of the cloud cover and rainfall patterns across the UK, obtained by a new network of radar weather stations, combined with the measurements of radioactivity levels in the air, rain water, milk and grass. They indicate why the hill areas of the west of Scotland, Cumbria and North Wales were the main areas of fall-out in Britain and why the movement and slaughter of sheep in south-west Cumbria and North Wales were banned for three weeks in June. Some aspects of Butterfly 'architecture' In a lecture of this title to the Cardiff Naturalists' Society during its winter season, Richard Tilley, Professor of Materials Science at the University College, Cardiff, considered the structure of the ova, scales and eyes of a butterfly as revealed by the scanning electron microscope. Some of the spectacular illustrations shown during the lecture are given here. They are of the ova of the elusive Brown Hairstreak (Thecla betulae). The ova are laid in August, on blackthorn, and persist for eight months or so, before hatching in the following Spring. In retrospect 25 years ago The Glamorgan Naturalists' Trust The first of the County Naturalists' Trusts to be formed in Wales was the one for the old county of Glamorgan. It was formed under the guidance of Col. H. J. Hambury, Neville Douglas Jones, Col. H. Morrey Salmon and Christopher Methuen Campbell at an inaugural meeting held on 21 January 1961 at Swansea and incorporated as a Trust at a meeting in Cardiff in May 1961. Jo Hambury, whose brainchild the Trust was, became the first Chairman and Dr. D. Dilwyn John, then Director of the National Museum, its first President. Col. Morrey Salmon recalls a little of the early history in an article on the growth of the voluntary conservation movement in Wales (in the special European Conservation Year 1970 issue of the journal Amgueddfa): 'Its main efforts have, perhaps somewhat naturally, been concentrated in the Gower peninsula, the first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty [in Britain] where scope for establishing nature reserves is greater than in the highly industrialised remainder of the county. It also played a considerable part in the negotiations which resulted in the purchase, by the National Trust out of 'Enterprise Neptune' funds, of the Whiteford Burrows, now a National