Honeybees use right antennae to tell friend from foe

To avoid a scuffle, a wayward honeybee might do best to stay on a stranger’s left. That’s because honeybees preferentially use their right antenna to distinguish between compadres and intruders, researchers report June 27 in Scientific Reports.

Scientists knew that the bees’ left and right antennae picked up different sensory cues, but the new work makes clear that this asymmetry extends into how bees navigate social situations.

The study also helps scientists understand a “big and interesting question: Why are our brains asymmetric?” says honeybee physiologist Julie Mustard of Arizona State University in Tempe. “The idea is that asymmetries allow the brain to have more area for processing complex information.”

Honeybee antennae are blanketed with a jungle of hairlike sensilla, microscopic protrusions housing neurons that transmit sensory information to the brain. Compared with the left antenna, the right contains more sensilla dedicated to smell, known to play a key role in honeybee communication.

To find out whether lopsidedness would influence behavior, researchers led by Giorgio Vallortigara of the University of Trento in Italy snipped bees’ right or left antennae and then paired off the clipped bees in petri dishes. When both members of the pair came from one hive, couples with intact right antennae responded quickly with a French kiss of sorts: They used their tongues to sample each other’s fluids. But leftie hive-mates held back the friendly overtures, sometimes exposing their jaws or pointing stingers at each other.

In pairs of bees from two different colonies, the right-antennaed bees wasted no time in becoming aggressive. The lefties, however, took longer to respond to the strangers and rarely bothered to get upset.

The right and left sides of the bees’ brains perform different functions, Vallortigara says, making their brains more like humans’ than scientists had expected. The open question is whether a common genetic recipe leads to brain asymmetry across species, Vallortigara says.

Every six years, Earth spins faster and then slower

The world turns slightly faster and slower on a regular 5.9-year cycle, a new study suggests. Researchers also found small speed changes that happen at the same time as sudden alterations in Earth’s magnetic field.

The world’s rotation speed can change slightly, by up to milliseconds per day, because of shifts in winds or the movement of fluid in Earth’s interior. Scientists can measure how fast the Earth spins by observing distant objects in space and timing how long they take to come back into view — that is one day length.

The new study, published in the July 11 Nature, found trends in day length after subtracting the effect of weather, allowing researchers to home in on the effect of Earth’s fluid core.

Scientists have previously found hints of six-year oscillations in day length, which occur at the same time as larger, slower changes. But the new analysis revealed that the cycle is remarkably regular, with the maximum change in day length occurring once every 5.9 years. Using decades’ worth of data, the researchers found that the oscillations maintained this precise timing and strength for half a century. “That’s got to be saying something important,” says geophysicist Bruce Buffett of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. It’s too early to say exactly what causes the oscillations, he adds.

This regularity undercuts one hypothesis for the cause of the cycles: fluctuations in the sun’s energy, which are more variable, says study author Richard Holme of the University of Liverpool in England. Instead, the cycle must be caused by something inside the Earth.

Holme’s team also detected sudden, tiny increases and decreases in the Earth’s rotation speed that coincided with abrupt changes in the behavior of Earth’s magnetic field, known as geomagnetic “jerks.” The new day-length data could help scientists understand what causes the mysterious jerks, Buffett says.

Along with hinting at what’s going on in Earth’s core, the research may help improve geomagnetic forecasts, which are crucial in mining exploration and drilling.

World’s first telescopic contact lens gives you Superman-like vision

 

An international team of researchers have created the first telescopic contact lens; a contact lens that, when it’s equipped, gives you the power to zoom your vision almost three times. Yes, this is the first ever example of a bionic eye that effectively gives you Superman-like eagle-eye vision.
As you can see in the photo above, the telescopic contact lens has two very distinct regions. The center of the lens allows light to pass straight through, providing normal vision. The outside edge, however, acts as a telescope capable of magnifying your sight by 2.8x. This is about the same as looking through a 100mm lens on a DSLR. For comparison, a pair of bird-watching binoculars might have a magnification of 15x. The examples shown in the image below give you a good idea of what a 2.8x optical zoom would look like in real life.

The main breakthrough is that this telescopic contact lens is just 1.17mm thick, allowing it to be comfortably worn. Other attempts at granting telescopic vision have included: a 4.4mm-thick contact lens (too thick for real-world use), telescopic spectacles (cumbersome and ugly), and most recently a telescopic lens implanted into the eye itself. The latter is currently the best option currently available, but it requires surgery and the image quality isn’t excellent.
To create a 1.17mm-thick telescope, the researchers — led by Joseph Ford of UCSD and Eric Tremblay of EPFL — had to be rather creative. The light that will be magnified enters the edge of the contact lens, is bounced around four times inside the lens using patterned aluminum mirrors, and then beamed to the edge of the retina at the back of your eyeball. The mirrors magnify the image 2.8 times, but also correct for chromatic aberration, resulting in a surprisingly high fidelity image. To switch between normal and telescopic vision, the central (normal, unmagnified) region of the contact lens has a polarizing filter in front of it — and then the wearer equips a pair of 3D TV spectacles. By switching the polarizing state of the spectacles (a pair of active, liquid crystal Samsung 3D specs in this case), the user can choose between normal and magnified vision.

In case you were wondering, these solutions all primarily exist for one reason: To help restore sight to people with age-related macular degeneration. AMD damages the high-resolution fovea at the center of the retina, but generally the low-resolution outer region (per fovea) still works. Without the fovea, people with AMD can’t make out fine details, such as type on a page. These telescopic spectacles, lenses, and implants focus light onto this outer region, giving people with AMD the ability to make out these details.
The current telescopic contact lens is made out of PMMA, a gas-impermeable polymer that old, uncomfortable contact lenses used to be made of. To bring their lens to market, the researchers will need to switch over to rigid gas permeable (RGP) polymers, which modern, comfortable contact lenses are made from. While these telescopic lenses are obviously intended for people who suffer from AMD, there’s nothing to prevent a healthy person from wearing them and achieving better-than-human (superhuman?) vision.

 

200-year-old fish caught!

A 40-pound shortraker fish, after minding its business for the past two centuries, was recently caught 10 miles off the coast of Alaska by a Seattle fisherman. But just looking at this thing we kinda wish he just left it where he found it.

Shortrakers, also known as rockfish, are actually quite common in the Pacific and are a prize among deep sea fisherman. They're colored in hues of orange, pink, and red, and can live at depths of nearly 4,000 feet.

The record-breaking shortraker was hauled in near Sitka during the week of June 24. But what's even more impressive than its weight is its remarkable age.

Troy Tidingco, Sitka area manager for the state Department of Fish and Game, said the fish is still being analyzed but he believes it is at least 200 years old. Tidingco said that would beat the current record of 175 years. Researchers are able to determine the age of a shortraker by the number of growth rings along its ear bone.

However, a previously caught rougheye rockfish, similar to the shortraker, was believed to have been 205 years old. Still, Tydingco said that record-setting fish “was quite a bit smaller” than the 41-inch specimen Liebman caught.

The fisherman who caught the shortraker, Henry Liebman, says he wants to mount it back home in Seattle, but he did provide the Alaska Department of Fish and Game with a tissue sample so its exact age could be confirmed. 

The purple frog

The purple frog was originally thought to belong to a unique family called Nasikabatrachidae, but was incorporated as a subfamily into the larger Sooglossidae family in 2006. Its closest relatives are the Seychelles frogs, the ancestors of which were present on the Indo-Madagascan land mass with the purple frog’s predecessors when it broke away from the supercontinent of Gondwana 120 million years ago. Formally discovered in 2003, the purple frog spends most of the year underground, surfacing only to breed during the monsoon. This species is threatened by ongoing forest loss for coffee, cardamom and ginger plantations.

Stem-cell transplants may purge HIV

Two men with HIV may have been cured after they received stem-cell transplants to treat the blood cancer lymphoma, their doctors announced today at the International AIDS Society Conference in Kuala Lumpur.
One of the men received stem-cell transplants to replace his blood-cell-producing bone marrow about three years ago, and the other five years ago. Their regimens were similar to one used on Timothy Ray Brown, the 'Berlin patient' who has been living HIV-free for six years and is the only adult to have been declared cured of HIV. Last July, doctors announced that the two men — the ‘Boston patients’ — appeared to be living without detectable levels of HIV in their blood, but they were still taking antiretroviral medications at that time.
Timothy Henrich, an HIV specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, who helped to treat the men, says that they have now stopped their antiretroviral treatments with no ill effects. One has been off medication for 15 weeks and the other for seven. Neither has any trace of HIV DNA or RNA in his blood.If the men stay healthy, they would be the third and fourth patients ever to be cured of HIV.
But Henrich and Daniel Kuritzkes, a colleague at Brigham who also worked with the men, caution that it is still too early know whether or not the Boston patients have been cured. For that, doctors will need to follow the men closely for at least a year, because the virus may be hiding out in 'reservoirs' — parts of the men’s bodies, such as their brain or gut, that can harbour the virus for decades.
“We’re being very careful not to say that these patients are cured,” Kuritzkes says. “But the findings to date are very encouraging.”
HIV researcher Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco, says that doctors might need to wait at least two years before declaring that a cure has been achieved. “Any evidence that we might be able to cure HIV infection remains a major advance,” Deeks says. But, he adds, “there have been cases of patients who took many weeks off therapy before the virus took off”.