#An Open-source Hive To Save The Bees You may have heard by now: bees are dropping like flies continuing to die at unprecedented rates
and the reason why is still a bit of a mystery. So to give them a leg up the group Open Tech Forever has developed a beehive that can track the health of bees
and is giving the code away to anyone who wants it. From the project site:
The Open source Beehives project is a collaborative response to the threat faced by bee populations in industrialised nations around the world.
The project proposes to design hives that can support bee colonies in a sustainable way to monitor
and track the health and behaviour of a colony as it develops. Each hive contains an open source sensory kit The Smart Citizen Kit (SCK)
which can transmit to an open data platform: Smartcitizen. methese sensor enhanced hive designs are open
and freely available online the data collected from each hive is published together with geolocations allowing for a further comparison and analysis of the hives.
If you're a professional beekeeper or hobbyist and handy with electronics you get a double-whammy:
a free design for a high-tech beehive that can monitor your bees'environment and a chance to contribute to citizen science.
This isn't the first attempt to enlist new technology to solve the bee crisis
Below is a closer look at the hives and you can find the source code for the hives at the project site.
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#TECHNOLOGY MEETS TRADITION SPONSORED ARTICLE It s not often you get an assignment from Popular Science to film a whisky distillery in Scotland especially not one as steeped in tradition as Glenfiddich.
#Spain Considers Release Of Genetically Modified Olive Fruit Fliesa company involved in creating genetically modified mosquitos has another project nearing outdoor testing.
The U k.-based Oxitec has applied to release genetically modified olive fruit flies under netted olive trees in Spain the BBC reports.
The flies are a major pest to olive crops. The idea is that the flies all male will mate with wild olive fruit flies.
Any female flies produced from such a union will die as maggots while any male offspring will carry the deadly gene
just as their fathers did. Over time this should bring down local olive fruit fly population dramatically. In a study done in cages weekly releases of the Oxitec flies crashed the fly population.
The added genes are similar to the ones that appear in Oxitec's mosquitos which the company has tested in Brazil bringing down one town's dengue-fever-carrying mosquito population by 96 percent.
The new program is less about'does this work?''and more about the first operational roll out of this technology Oxitec cofounder Luke Alphey told the New Scientist in September.
Allowing genetically engineered insects to fly free is controversial. So far insects are the only genetically modified animals that companies have released into the wild.
U s. officials are considering allowing a company to sell genetically modified salmon that would be farmed in inland tanks.)
The BBC talked with Helen Wallace a spokeswoman from Genewatch an opposing group. The modified olive fruit flies may have other unwanted genetic traits such as pesticide resistance that they'll spread among wild flies Wallace said.
The group is concerned also about GM maggots living for some time in olives before their genes kill them off.
Oxitec officials say genetically modified olive fruit flies would reduce the need for pesticides which is good for the environment.
The deadly genes should only work in flies unlike pesticides which affect many insect species including ones people may be interested in protecting such as pollinators o
#What Sound Does A Fox Really Make? A music video from a Norwegian duo called Ylvis is primed to as the kids marketers say go viral
because it is catchy and weird and foreign and about animals. The lyrics are simple:
Bà ¥rd Ylvisã Â¥ker and Vegard Ylvisã Â¥ker the folks behind Ylvis describe the vocalizations of various common animals from cats to dogs to ducks to cows
and then in the pre-chorus wonder what sound the fox makes. The chorus then suggests a few possibilities like Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding and Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow.
Good suggestions Bà ¥rd Ylvisã Â¥ker and Vegard Ylvisã Â¥ker! But I think we can come up with something slightly more scientifically accurate
and also watch lots of videos of foxes while we do it. So! In Norway where Ylvis is from there are two species of fox:
the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) and the red fox (Vulpes vulpes. Here in the States we have a few others like the gray fox and the kit fox.
All species of fox have a pretty wide variety of vocalizations just as dogs and cats Do it's simple to reduce say a dog's vocalizations to bark
but as any owner knows dogs can yelp whine howl growl and make all kinds of other sounds.
Foxes aren't quite as varied in their vocalizations as dogs but they're still capable of making lots of different sounds.
The red fox which is the most common species of fox worldwide (and almost certainly the fox variety Ylvis is talking about;
there are only about 120 arctic foxes left in Norway) is highly vocal. Foxes are canids like dogs
and wolves but are not closely related to either; in fact they hunt more like cats with a low-to-the-ground stalking posture
and bite hard with sharp thin teeth to kill prey (dogs and wolves tend to have duller larger teeth and use a clamp and shake method to kill).
In vocalizations too foxes aren't entirely like dogs. The most commonly heard red fox vocalizations are a quick series of barks and a scream-y variation on a howl.
All fox vocalizations are pitched higher than dog vocalizations partly because foxes are much smaller. The barks are a sort of ow-wow-wow-wow but very high-pitched almost yippy.
It's commonly mistaken for an owl hooting. That bark sequence is thought to be an identification system;
studies indicate that foxes can tell each other apart by this call. The scream-y howl is heard most often during the breeding season in the springtime.
It is...horrible. A shrill hoarse scream of anguish it sounds more than anything like a human baby undergoing some kind of physical torture.
It's thought that this call is used by vixens (female foxes) to lure male foxes to them for mating though males have been found to make this sound occasionally as well.
The bark and scream and very loud so they're often heard but most other fox vocalizations are quiet
and used for communication between individuals in close proximity. The most unusual is called gekkering; it's a guttural chattering with occasional yelps and howls like an ack-ack-ack-ackawoooo-ack-ack-ack.
Gekkering is heard amongst adults in aggressive encounters (of which there are many; red foxes are highly territorial) and also amongst young kits playing
(or play-fighting). There's also the alarm call which up close sounds like a cough but from afar sounds like a sharp bark and is used mostly by fox parents to alert youngsters to danger.
Red foxes unlike other familiar canids like the gray wolf and coyote do not form packs. When kits are young they
and the mother may form a small family unit but in general foxes are solitary. Still they sometimes inhabit the same territory
and so have a social hierarchy which requires communication. Submissive foxes when greeting dominant foxes will sometimes emit piercing whines
which can elevate in volume and become shrieks. Foxes communicate with kits largely with body gestures
but also make huffing and coughing noises and sometimes brief clucks like a casual short form of gekkering.
That's what sound the fox makes! But equally interesting is why most people don't know what sound the fox makes.
It's a widespread enormously successful and adaptive species living worldwide in all sorts of climates in forests on mountains in suburbs and sometimes even cities.
Americans and Europeans are very familiar with the red fox. And unlike say a raccoon it's a highly vocal animal.
So how come we have no idea what it sounds like? One major reason is that it's a wild animal.
The children's toys that teach the sounds of animals focus on domestic animals mostly livestock. Pig cow sheep rooster duck horse--these are farm animals
which in America's collective agrarian past were members of the household. You'll notice that on this toy you won't see any of the most common North american wild animals--no raccoons no coyotes no deer no robins no hawks and no foxes.
What sound does the deer make? Hell if I know. Another reason might be that fox noises are mistaken easily for other animals.
The common yow-wow-wow-wow sounds more like an owl than a canid and the scream-howl sounds less like a fox than the soundtrack to a nightmare.
And foxes are nocturnal hunters which means we're asleep when they're making most of their noises.
Then there's the other problem. Foxes are common and cute they feature in myths and we have gone to extreme lengths to make them our pets
but the noises they make are sort of...awful. The red fox does not have a mellifluous voice;
even when it's happy it mostly sounds like it's being strangled. It would be awkward to teach your young child that the cow goes moo the frog goes croak
and the fox goes YAAGGAGHHGHHHHHHAHHHH!!!But! Now you know. The fox goes yow-wow-wow ack-ack-ackawoo-ack and YAAGGAGHHGHHHHHHAHHHH!!!
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Do Animals Have Orgasms? Ah the age-old question. When animals are going at it like uh animals how does it end?
Is there an animal version of the Big O? It's a bit hard to say actually.
Unlike humans animals can't tell us they're having orgasms so we can't truly know what their experience is like.
For the most part we assume that male animals orgasm because there's an ejaculation --though one can happen without the other they usually go hand-in-hand.
The question of female orgasm is as usual more hotly contested though all female mammals have clitorises. Scientists can infer that animals--mostly primates--orgasm through recording physiological
Studies of primate orgasm have focused often on macaques a subset of monkeys which are used often in research
According to Alfonso Troisi a clinical psychiatrist in Rome who has studied female orgasm in Japanese macaques they're easier to study in the lab than gorillas or chimps.
Macaques species tend to have longer copulations than other primate species like gorillas which is a bonus
In the lab by artificial stimulation it is possible to trigger female orgasm in virtually any primate species. In a 1998 study he
and his co-author wrote that Under specific circumstances nonhuman primate females may experience orgasm. But the rate at which the females orgasmed was variable
Their study found that the level of dominance of the male macaque might play a role for instance.
me via email In the lab by artificial stimulation it is possible to trigger female orgasm in virtually any primate species. At the Institute for Primate Studies in Norman Okla. psychologist William Lemmon
and his grad student Mel Allen argued that the female chimpanzee manifests most if not all of the indices of sexual arousal and orgasm that occur in women.
Allen manually stimulated the clitorises and vaginas of female chimps in the course of writing his master's thesis at the University of Oklahoma Sexual response and orgasm in the female chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes.
Stanford university anthropologist Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff in 1974 writing on homosexual encounters between female stumptail macaques:
So when it comes to primates orgasms definitely seem to occur. What about the rest of the animal kingdom?
Who knows whether it feels like a human orgasm but the external behaviour looks like it.
The male red-billed buffalo weaver is the only species of bird we know of that exhibits orgasm-like behavior according to Tim Birkhead a professor in Sheffield University's Department of Animal and Plant sciences.
Birkhead spent years trying to observe the birds getting down culminating in a study published in 2001.
The buffalo weaver a native of Sub-saharan africa has a fake penis--it has no sperm duct
but when Birkhead and his colleagues manually stimulated a buffalo weaver's mock member the bird had seemed
As Birkhead described to me via email the bird shudders its wings and clenches its feet as it ejaculates--who knows
First of all orgasms aside animals don't get it on because they really want to make babies. They do it because it feels good
Morisaka did catch the first spontaneous ejaculation ever recorded in a dolphin which he published (with a mildly NSFW video) in a hyper-readable study in PLOS ONE Spontaneous ejaculation has thus far been recorded in drowsy rats guinea pigs domestic cats warthogs horses and chimpanzees according to the study.
As fun as this kind of research is to read about watching animals get down in the hopes of detailing their climaxes in a scholarly manner appears to have gone out of style.
The 1970s and 1980s were the golden years for primate research and animal ethology according to Troisi who left primate research a decade ago.
Nowadays there is little money around (even in the US) field researchers get no funds and scientists working in the lab face the opposition of animal rights activists.
In addition this the era of neuroscience and molecular genetics. Few people pay attention to behavioral observation he wrote.
what it was like to chase around mating birds: I'd run after them sweating profusely with my binoculars steaming up.
University of Toronto researcher Frances Burton's 1970 work which involved hooking monkeys up in a dog-harness contraption
and stimulating them with essentially a silicon monkey dildo for instance might be tough to get approved these days.
And though it's likely that most nonhuman primates have the ability to orgasm we can't really know for sure
what all this points to is our own inability to know what other animals experience p
#Green Energy Scheme To Burn Beetle-Infested Trees For Electricityaldo Leopold described the burning of wood as re-releasing the sunshine the tree depended upon to grow.
In a new program the U s. Forest Service is fueling a biomass power plant in Colorado with trees killed by a pest called the mountain pine beetle Greenwire reports.
The Eagle Valley Clean Energy plant will burn 250 tons of wood daily for the next 50 years Greenwire reports creating electricity for the residents of the small town of Gypsum.
Since the late 1990s Colorado has had to deal with unusual numbers of beetle-killed pine trees.
Mountain pine beetles are native to North america and normally infest some trees every year but warmer winters have meant their populations are now unusually high.
The band Superhuman Happiness recorded a new song and music video with the Treequencer. Someday Shaffer and his colleagues hope to waterproof their invention add solar panels to power it
The researchers who gathered at Drake University in Des moines note that Iowa has vacillated between two weather extremes over the past few years.
The attack came from Chrysler the smallest of Detroit's Big Three automakers in the form of a television commercial for the new Dodge Charger.
In the ad the Charger is traveling through a long gloomy tunnel the camera tracking with it.
They drove teams of horses herds of goats drifts of sheep. Animals Smith argues are autonomous.
Thus in the eyes of the law an autonomous vehicle is arguably similar to a horse-drawn buggy.
And under the Geneva convention a basic legal requirement for drivers whether of animals or of cars is the same.
The driver must have control. Who has control of a driverless car? For the autonomous vehicle that now drives Levandowski to work the answer (according to Smith) is logical:
and oversight to guard against situations like a deer running into the road; the car must be able to hand back control with no warning.
when the AI core of one of these vehicles craters in the middle of the rush-hour commute
and time-intensive field work according to a new study of the pine processionary moth a pest that destroys pine and cedar trees.
The caterpillars make distinctive highly visible silk nests in the trees they live in so they are relatively easy to track from afar.
The researchers from France's National Institute of Agronomic Research found that in a region of 18000 square miles in France where the caterpillars had set up shop data collected by examining Google street view was 96 percent as accurate as traditional field
Nor would Street view be a good way to track all species. Evidence of the pine processionary moth's habitat is highly visible from tree-lined roads
while napping like a dog having dreams about chasing squirrels except I think that day I literally had a dream in which
and a LEYBOARD AND MOUSE and an extra monitor and typing this on a cracked 3-inch screen like an idiot12:
I hope the texture is like the fur of an Australian brush tail possum. 1: 20 commenter says I do not understand how this guy still has a job...
and full of bias--an example being the ones on the wolves --and they were written by Dan.
while bird eggs can come in all sorts of colors and patterns chicken eggs are almost always white or brown.
-but the changed genes simply have been passed down from bird to bird-essentially creating a new breed.
While they go to work pollinating our crops bees could simultaneously bring natural microbial pest control agents to help those crops stave off disease.
Using a technique called bee vectoring researchers force bees to walk through a pesticide before they can exit their hives coating them in a fungus bacterium
America's honeybee population is dying. Scientists have suggested that this colony collapse disorder could be the result of long-term exposure to a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids
For example honeybees or bumblebees can be used to carry natural pest killers like the fungus Beauveria bassiana
which controls populations of aphids whiteflies termites and more. Save the bees from disease and they can in turn save our food.
One additional worry is that a weakening and eventual reversal in the field would disorient all those species that rely on geomagnetism for navigation including bees salmon turtles whales bacteria and pigeons.
and migrating birds fish and turtles are going to be confused very. Just when this will happen how long it will take and
what the consequences will be is difficult to fathom. What is not in doubt though is that it will happen.
what is going to happen to all those birds fish and other animals that migrate vast distances using their own internal magnetic compass?
Will they have time to re-draw their magnetic maps and get new bearings? Even more creatures such as bees and some bacteria use a sense of magnetism for finding their way around their local territories for a north/south
The cat was out of the bag; and the use of poison gas continued to escalate for the remainder of the war.
On the evening of 24 september 1915 therefore some 400 chlorine gas emplacements were established among The british front line around Loos. The gas was released by turning a cock on each cylinder.
and the mouse in your pocket and as far as copyright laws consider how much Popsci plagiarizes it articles of the internet.
no mouse included. adaptation Say check out this article! http://www. salon. com/2013/09/11/how do you dispose of chemical weapons newscred/You may enjoy the first picture in the article too. adaptation2) Say check out this article!
Past winners have included research on remote-controlled whale snot retrieval and the physics of why you don't spill your coffee.
assessing the effect of listening to opera on heart transplant patients who are mice. Reference:
discovering that when dung beetles get lost they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky way.
Dung beetles Use the Milky way for Orientation Marie Dacke Emily Baird Marcus Byrne Clarke H. Scholtz Eric J. Warrant Current Biology epub January 24 2013.
inventing an electromechanical system to trap airplane hijackers the system drops a hijacker through trap doors seals him into a package then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors
parboiling a dead shrew and then swallowing the shrew without chewing and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system and
which bones would not. Reference: Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton Peter W. Stahl and Brian D. Crandall Journal of Archaeological Science vol. 22 november 1995 pp. 789ã¢Â#Â7.
Bert J. Tolkamp Marie J. Haskell Fritha M. Langford David J. Roberts Colin A. Morgan Applied Animal Behaviour Science vol. 124
There were people dressed as mice and also an opera. Ed note: If cow tipping were real this could be complicated significantly more.
The report looks at the so-called superbugs that modern American healthcare and farming practices have bred.
When people (or animals) take antibiotics they don't need the medicines kill off most bacteria while leaving behind a few germs that are naturally genetically resistant to the treatment.
From that big frozen bird. The recommended oil temperature for a deep fryer is 350°well above the boiling point of water.
Within a few minutes the moisture in the bird dissapates so the oil isn't splashing excessively.
I always do a final check with a meat thermometer to in sure the bird is done.
That's why we incinerate our animals. And as a bonus the contrast makes us beleive the inside is juicy. that sounds like total bull ive had boiled chicken
If you really cook your bird at that temp I feel your methods might have run afoul.
Remember the turkey is just a dead bird nothing more. FAMILY and FRIEND ARE EVERYTHING! ENJOY!
Checkout Camp Chef's cast iron Ultimate Turkey Roaster which produces a much better overall turkey cooking result without the danger of frying yourself your children your pets or anything else other than the turkey.
and rubs and the same burner to cook the bird in the same amount of per-pound time.
Tet the sable and pour yourself a glass of turkey Step 19: Bless the saying pass
Factory-farmed chickens aren treated t really as animals he says; they re machines that transform vegetable inputs into chicken breasts.
the spider-goat--and that's just today. Our favorite though is this live-streaming goat-cam showing off the Nigerian dwarf goats of a farm in Minnesota.
For more about goats consult your local petting zoo. Or read Modern Farmer this week.
Goats are cool animals with great personalities. ---In space no one can hear a tree fall in the forest t
#Follow A Queen bee On Her Maiden Mating Flightqueen honeybees mate just once in their lives within weeks of emerging as an adult from the little honeycomb cells in
Their mating flights may be the only time they ever leave their hive. But at least they seem to make the most of it:
More than Honey a recent documentary about the death of domestic honeybee hives around the world includes the amazing bees'-eye video of this flight above.
They shot other bee scenes in the documentary showing the insects moving around in their hives or feeding at flowers at 70 frames per second to show each bee's minute movements.
And they used endoscopes the cameras doctors use during surgery to see inside hives. More than Honey is in theaters now in the U k. It's already had its run in the U s. showing in New york in June and in Los angeles in August.
if it would be possible to armor domestic queens so they could take over killer bee hives.
If simply giving her a little extra temporary armor would allow her to defeat the killer bee queen
and take over the killer bee hive e
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