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Focus magazine Q&A,
The height sea level Tower House, Fairfax Street,
has been rising Bristol, BS1 3BN

annually since 1993 questions@bbcmagazinesbristol.com
Do ants ever sleep?
PAUL BACHELOR, BY EMAIL
Ants defi nitely rest – in any given colony there will always be some
individuals that are standing still, not doing anything. Ants are also
inactive in cold temperatures and many species hibernate through the
winter. Resting ants exhibit loss of muscle tone and reduced sensitivity
to stimuli. But they don’t have a complex enough nervous system to
exhibit the different brain wave patterns seen in humans during sleep;
nor do they dream. LV
Who worked out the
length of a second?
PAUL BACHELOR, BY EMAIL
The term ‘second’ comes from the second division of an hour by a
factor of 60 using the weird ‘sexagesimal’ counting system adopted
by the Babylonians. The fi rst use of so fi ne a division of an hour
began around 1000AD, but it took almost another 600 years before
clocks capable of measuring out seconds reliably became available.
DID YOU
Today, the second is defi ned by a fundamental physical process
– it’s the time needed for a caesium
KNOW atom to emit exactly 9,192,631,770
waves of a certain type of radiation.
This process is measured by
atomic clocks. For more
Also known as the
on time, see the
‘corpse fl ower’, the
December issue
Amorphophallus titanum
of Focus. RM
– or titan arum – is
believed by many people
to be the smelliest plant
on Earth. When it
blooms, it releases an
extremely foul odour
that smells like
Every second
rotten fl esh, and
counts (and
can be detected
so does
up to half a every wave of
mile away. radiation)
www.bbcfocusmagazine.com November 2008 43
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