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Egg police crack down on broody bees
Research news and discovery
ALAMY
In brief– Double vision
Ice, steam, liquid, and now a new type of water AN EXOTIC form of water could be the key to storing hydrogen for use in fuel cells. Wendy Mao at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and colleagues bombarded ice with X-rays for around 6 hours at extremely high pressures comparable to those at which diamond forms. To their surprise, the water molecules broke down into separate oxygen and hydrogen molecules, which then recombined to form a brownish, stable alloy (Science, vol 314, p 636). “This is a novel material, uniquely different from
water,” says David Mao, a team member at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. “It is very energetic, but stable and does not react back to form water when kept at high pressure.” Once synthesised, the alloy can be stored for over 120 days at temperatures up to 400 °C when kept at high pressure. The team is now characterising the properties of the alloy and Mao suggests that the material could be used as a way of storing and transporting hydrogen for use in fuel cells. Hydrogen is widely touted as a fuel of the future but questions remain over how it can be stored and transported safely and cheaply. It is expensive to liquefy and the gas damages metal containers and pipes.
Egg police crack down on broody bees WOULD better policing reduce crime? It does in some insect societies. The apparently harmonious behaviour of worker honeybees and common wasps is all down to a watchful police force. Tom Wenseleers of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in the Netherlands and Francis Ratnieks of the University of Sheffield, UK, studied nine species of social wasps and the honeybee. In all of 16 | NewScientist | 4 November 2006
061104_N_p16_17_InBrief 16
these colonies the workers have functional ovaries and could lay eggs, but instead they usually raise the offspring of the queen. What stops them from being selfish and laying their own eggs? The answer turned out to be the “egg police”. Wenseleers and Ratnieks found that the more effective the policing – where the queen or worker “police” eat worker-laid eggs – the lower the
likelihood of a renegade worker laying its own egg (Nature, vol 444, p 50). “In honeybees the policing was so good, with 98 to 100 per cent of worker-laid eggs killed, that less than one in a thousand workers tried to lay an egg,” says Ratnieks. Conversely in some wasp species – particularly those with closely related workers – policing was slack and nearly half the workers laid eggs. When workers were not closely related they policed each other more strictly.
THE quantum world is about to get bigger thanks to a technique that will allow objects big enough to see with the naked eye to exist in two places at once. Quantum properties are most prominent in single particles. In bigger objects thermal vibrations destroy the quantum effects. So in theory, chilling a large object should allow its quantum properties to shine through. This week, three teams of physicists have perfected a way of doing this (Nature, vol 444, p 67). Their technique is to bombard a mirror of roughly 1014 atoms with photons in a way that damps out thermal vibrations, cooling it to 135 millikelvin. However, the researchers will need sophisticated techniques to see the quantum behaviour. “You can see the mirror with the naked eye but you won’t be able to resolve the quantum effects,” says Markus Aspelmeyer, at the University of Vienna in Austria.
Fresh ammo to kill rogue prions IT IS a ray of hope in the battle against prion diseases such as vCJD, the human form of mad cow disease. German chemists have made a group of compounds with an “unprecedented” ability to destroy the malformed prions thought to cause such diseases. Peter Gmeiner of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and his team synthesised 18 compounds combining parts of a molecule called quinacrine – now in clinical trials as a therapy for human prion diseases – with the antidepressant, imipramine, which also has anti-prion activity (Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/jm060773j). Tests on mouse cells with the disease scrapie showed the compounds destroyed prions, with one having 15 times the potency of quinacrine. www.newscientist.com
30/10/06 5:19:45 pm
ALAMY
In brief– Double vision
Ice, steam, liquid, and now a new type of water AN EXOTIC form of water could be the key to storing hydrogen for use in fuel cells. Wendy Mao at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and colleagues bombarded ice with X-rays for around 6 hours at extremely high pressures comparable to those at which diamond forms. To their surprise, the water molecules broke down into separate oxygen and hydrogen molecules, which then recombined to form a brownish, stable alloy (Science, vol 314, p 636). “This is a novel material, uniquely different from
water,” says David Mao, a team member at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. “It is very energetic, but stable and does not react back to form water when kept at high pressure.” Once synthesised, the alloy can be stored for over 120 days at temperatures up to 400 °C when kept at high pressure. The team is now characterising the properties of the alloy and Mao suggests that the material could be used as a way of storing and transporting hydrogen for use in fuel cells. Hydrogen is widely touted as a fuel of the future but questions remain over how it can be stored and transported safely and cheaply. It is expensive to liquefy and the gas damages metal containers and pipes.
Egg police crack down on broody bees WOULD better policing reduce crime? It does in some insect societies. The apparently harmonious behaviour of worker honeybees and common wasps is all down to a watchful police force. Tom Wenseleers of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in the Netherlands and Francis Ratnieks of the University of Sheffield, UK, studied nine species of social wasps and the honeybee. In all of 16 | NewScientist | 4 November 2006
061104_N_p16_17_InBrief 16
these colonies the workers have functional ovaries and could lay eggs, but instead they usually raise the offspring of the queen. What stops them from being selfish and laying their own eggs? The answer turned out to be the “egg police”. Wenseleers and Ratnieks found that the more effective the policing – where the queen or worker “police” eat worker-laid eggs – the lower the
likelihood of a renegade worker laying its own egg (Nature, vol 444, p 50). “In honeybees the policing was so good, with 98 to 100 per cent of worker-laid eggs killed, that less than one in a thousand workers tried to lay an egg,” says Ratnieks. Conversely in some wasp species – particularly those with closely related workers – policing was slack and nearly half the workers laid eggs. When workers were not closely related they policed each other more strictly.
THE quantum world is about to get bigger thanks to a technique that will allow objects big enough to see with the naked eye to exist in two places at once. Quantum properties are most prominent in single particles. In bigger objects thermal vibrations destroy the quantum effects. So in theory, chilling a large object should allow its quantum properties to shine through. This week, three teams of physicists have perfected a way of doing this (Nature, vol 444, p 67). Their technique is to bombard a mirror of roughly 1014 atoms with photons in a way that damps out thermal vibrations, cooling it to 135 millikelvin. However, the researchers will need sophisticated techniques to see the quantum behaviour. “You can see the mirror with the naked eye but you won’t be able to resolve the quantum effects,” says Markus Aspelmeyer, at the University of Vienna in Austria.
Fresh ammo to kill rogue prions IT IS a ray of hope in the battle against prion diseases such as vCJD, the human form of mad cow disease. German chemists have made a group of compounds with an “unprecedented” ability to destroy the malformed prions thought to cause such diseases. Peter Gmeiner of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and his team synthesised 18 compounds combining parts of a molecule called quinacrine – now in clinical trials as a therapy for human prion diseases – with the antidepressant, imipramine, which also has anti-prion activity (Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/jm060773j). Tests on mouse cells with the disease scrapie showed the compounds destroyed prions, with one having 15 times the potency of quinacrine. www.newscientist.com
30/10/06 5:19:45 pm