Tracking Naked Mole-Rats

Tracking Naked Mole-Rats – BBC Click

This week BBC Click is Tracking Naked Mole-Rats, looking at Twitter as a broadcasting platform and fighting poaching.

Tracking Naked Mole-Rats with Julie Freeman

We head to the Utopia Treasury in the Great Arch at Somerset House in London where Julie Freeman has a hybrid artwork looking at a colony of mole rats (which are highly cooperative naturally altruistic).

To find out more about the animals she has set up a system to track the naked mole rats and get a real-time data feed. As well as using the data for science, she is using art material to let the animals compose, animate, and give life to the screen-based and physical artworks. She is also releasing some of the animal movements as a live open data feed for other people to access and use.

Enchanted learning wrote Naked Mole-Rats are about 3 inches (7 cm) long; they weigh 1 to 2.4 ounces (30 to 70 grams). Because there is no fat under their skin, their skin is wrinkled; the skin is pink, grey, or white/yellow. These unusual mammals also lack sweat glands. They have tiny eyes and ears.

The head is short and wide; the jaws are very powerful.

Like all rodents, their two front teeth continue to grow throughout their lives. They use these incisors to dig tunnels. Naked Mole-Rats have a life span of 10 to 30 years.

Also in the week’s programme:-

Mahima Kaul, from Twitter India:

Click talks to the new head of public policy for Twitter in India, Mahima Kaul, about which initiatives Twitter supports. For example, the recent mentorship series, the increasing use of Twitter as a broadcasting platform, and their support for the recent CyFy.

Phuket Island Radio is active on Twitter and has been using Twitter as a broadcasting platform utilizing the “Periscope” function since early 2015.

Welcome to Project Internet Saathi:

India’s charitable Tata Trust is collaborating with Google on the project Internet Saathi – bringing the internet to rural areas via a special bicycle kitted up with computer and connectivity equipment. Click talks to the volunteer bicyclists and the Tata Trust.

May we introduce Wild:

Kenyan researchers have developed an app to help fight to poach. Wild (Wildlife Information Landscape Database), was developed by iLAB at Strathmore University in Nairobi, but the concept is fully owned by the users – conservancies and, by extension, rangers. Michael Kaloki reports from Nairobi.

Phuket Island radio transmits BBC Click every Sunday morning at 9:30 along with other EDUtainment from 8 am, two hours of programming from the BBC.

Picture credits zoomschool.com and enchantedlearning.com

Stay tuned to Phuket FM Radio broadcasting on 91.5 and 102.5 FM throughout Phuket.