- Email: [email protected]
Uber-tidy bees save the day
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
kim Taylot/naturepl.com
FOR some, cleanliness is next to godliness. For honeybees, it’s a way of saving the hive from disaster. The varroa mite sucks the blood of worker bees’ pupae, reducing their immunity to disease, transmitting viruses and sometimes causing the entire hive to collapse. Bees have one trick up their sleeve: being tidy. Hygienic worker bees find and dispose of infected pupae. To study this behaviour, Francis Ratnieks of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, and colleagues placed a section of honeycomb that had been frozen to kill the pupae inside 42 honeybee colonies. Within a day, most had removed around half of the dead pupae, but some had managed to remove more than 95 per cent (Journal of Apicultural Research, doi.org/x68). These super-hygienic colonies also had less than half the varroa mite levels of the less hygienic colonies, and were also less likely to show shrivelled wings – a sign of a virus infection. “This finding could be very useful for beekeepers as it would reduce the harmful effects of varroa in a natural way,” says Ratnieks. “You can breed for this behaviour by screening colonies and breeding the most hygienic.” His team confirmed this in a separate study (Journal of Apicultural Research, doi.org/x69).
Scans reveal what many women ejaculate at orgasm WHAT do you think of when you hear the words “female ejaculation”? It was banned last year from being shown in British porn films, but what exactly is it? The first ultrasound scans on women who express a large amount of liquid from their urethra at orgasm have helped to define the phenomenon. Some women express a small amount of milky fluid – some scientists consider this the female ejaculate. Other women report “squirting” a much larger amount of fluid – enough to make it look
as if they have wet the bed. Small studies suggest the milky fluid comes from Skene’s glands – tiny structures that drain into the urethra. To investigate squirting, Samuel Salama at the Parly II private hospital in Le Chesnay, France, and his team recruited seven women who produce large amounts of liquid at orgasm. Scans taken as the women climaxed showed that this fluid almost certainly came from the bladder. Two women showed no difference between the chemicals in their urine and the fluid squirted:
in other words, the fluid was urine. The other five women had a small amount of prostatic-specific antigen (PSA) in their fluid – an enzyme not detected in an initial urine sample, but which is part of the “true” female ejaculate (Journal of Sexual Medicine, doi.org/x4r). “There are evidently two different fluids, with two different sources,” says Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. It seems some women expel just female ejaculate, others urine or urine with some ejaculate mixed in. cnri/spl
Uber-tidy bees save the day
Quick sniff for chemical weapons PHEW, what an invention! A device that sniffs out tiny quantities of mustard gas and lewisite on the go could help protect workers tasked with cleaning up chemical weapons. Identifying mystery molecules often requires sophisticated equipment and slow preliminary steps to concentrate samples. Instead, the new approach uses water vapour in the air to process the sample before analysis. Air containing a potential weapon sample is drawn into the device and zapped with electricity, charging the vapour, which starts to break down chemicals in the sample. A counter stream of air whisks away any highly reactive ions created by the zap that might otherwise destroy small amounts of the broken-down weapon molecules. What’s left is then identified by a mass spectrometer. Yasuo Seto of the National Research Institute of Police Science in Japan, who led the work, says his device can detect concentrations one hundredth of fatal levels and has begun using it to search for weapons abandoned in China after the second world war (Analytical Chemistry, doi.org/x6m).
Recipe for growing your own gut SOON you’ll be able to grow your own gut. Take a small sample of human intestine, grind it up and soak it in digestive enzymes, pipette the mixture onto a polymer scaffold and implant it into the abdominal cavity of a mouse. A few weeks later, you will have a tiny segment of fully functioning human gut. Tracy Grikscheit at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles wants a new way to treat intestinal failure, which is rare but kills almost one-third of babies affected within five years. Replacing the diseased part of the gut with engineered tissue is one
option. Four weeks after the scaffolds seeded with human gut tissue were put into mice, Grikscheit and her colleagues found the transplants had grown and had many of the features typical of the human small intestine. The gut cells could also break down complex sugars into simple glucose (American Journal of Physiology, doi.org/x6k). The work is a crucial step towards treatments in babies, says Grikscheit. “Having a surrogate system in which you can prove the tissue grows properly is important.” The next step is to produce larger samples of tissue.
17 January 2015 | NewScientist | 15
kim Taylot/naturepl.com
FOR some, cleanliness is next to godliness. For honeybees, it’s a way of saving the hive from disaster. The varroa mite sucks the blood of worker bees’ pupae, reducing their immunity to disease, transmitting viruses and sometimes causing the entire hive to collapse. Bees have one trick up their sleeve: being tidy. Hygienic worker bees find and dispose of infected pupae. To study this behaviour, Francis Ratnieks of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, and colleagues placed a section of honeycomb that had been frozen to kill the pupae inside 42 honeybee colonies. Within a day, most had removed around half of the dead pupae, but some had managed to remove more than 95 per cent (Journal of Apicultural Research, doi.org/x68). These super-hygienic colonies also had less than half the varroa mite levels of the less hygienic colonies, and were also less likely to show shrivelled wings – a sign of a virus infection. “This finding could be very useful for beekeepers as it would reduce the harmful effects of varroa in a natural way,” says Ratnieks. “You can breed for this behaviour by screening colonies and breeding the most hygienic.” His team confirmed this in a separate study (Journal of Apicultural Research, doi.org/x69).
Scans reveal what many women ejaculate at orgasm WHAT do you think of when you hear the words “female ejaculation”? It was banned last year from being shown in British porn films, but what exactly is it? The first ultrasound scans on women who express a large amount of liquid from their urethra at orgasm have helped to define the phenomenon. Some women express a small amount of milky fluid – some scientists consider this the female ejaculate. Other women report “squirting” a much larger amount of fluid – enough to make it look
as if they have wet the bed. Small studies suggest the milky fluid comes from Skene’s glands – tiny structures that drain into the urethra. To investigate squirting, Samuel Salama at the Parly II private hospital in Le Chesnay, France, and his team recruited seven women who produce large amounts of liquid at orgasm. Scans taken as the women climaxed showed that this fluid almost certainly came from the bladder. Two women showed no difference between the chemicals in their urine and the fluid squirted:
in other words, the fluid was urine. The other five women had a small amount of prostatic-specific antigen (PSA) in their fluid – an enzyme not detected in an initial urine sample, but which is part of the “true” female ejaculate (Journal of Sexual Medicine, doi.org/x4r). “There are evidently two different fluids, with two different sources,” says Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. It seems some women expel just female ejaculate, others urine or urine with some ejaculate mixed in. cnri/spl
Uber-tidy bees save the day
Quick sniff for chemical weapons PHEW, what an invention! A device that sniffs out tiny quantities of mustard gas and lewisite on the go could help protect workers tasked with cleaning up chemical weapons. Identifying mystery molecules often requires sophisticated equipment and slow preliminary steps to concentrate samples. Instead, the new approach uses water vapour in the air to process the sample before analysis. Air containing a potential weapon sample is drawn into the device and zapped with electricity, charging the vapour, which starts to break down chemicals in the sample. A counter stream of air whisks away any highly reactive ions created by the zap that might otherwise destroy small amounts of the broken-down weapon molecules. What’s left is then identified by a mass spectrometer. Yasuo Seto of the National Research Institute of Police Science in Japan, who led the work, says his device can detect concentrations one hundredth of fatal levels and has begun using it to search for weapons abandoned in China after the second world war (Analytical Chemistry, doi.org/x6m).
Recipe for growing your own gut SOON you’ll be able to grow your own gut. Take a small sample of human intestine, grind it up and soak it in digestive enzymes, pipette the mixture onto a polymer scaffold and implant it into the abdominal cavity of a mouse. A few weeks later, you will have a tiny segment of fully functioning human gut. Tracy Grikscheit at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles wants a new way to treat intestinal failure, which is rare but kills almost one-third of babies affected within five years. Replacing the diseased part of the gut with engineered tissue is one
option. Four weeks after the scaffolds seeded with human gut tissue were put into mice, Grikscheit and her colleagues found the transplants had grown and had many of the features typical of the human small intestine. The gut cells could also break down complex sugars into simple glucose (American Journal of Physiology, doi.org/x6k). The work is a crucial step towards treatments in babies, says Grikscheit. “Having a surrogate system in which you can prove the tissue grows properly is important.” The next step is to produce larger samples of tissue.
17 January 2015 | NewScientist | 15