The content below is from _165__ of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast
RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT
This week I recommend you watch Community!
- The entire show is on Netflix right now (at least in the states) and it is one of the most bingable shows out there. Dan Harmon created this hilarious career boosting show almost a decade and ago (long before his success with Rick and Morty).
- Here’s the plot:
- When fast-talking lawyer Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) finds his degree has been revoked, he is forced to go back to school at Greendale Community College. Hoping to score points with a pretty coed, he invents a study group and invites her to join it. Imagine his surprise when she’s not the only one who shows up for help with Spanish from the “board-certified tutor” he proclaims himself to be. Though his command of the language is anything but good, the members continue to meet and end up learning a lot about themselves.
- I binged this show back in college and decided to rewatch it after they announced the community movie (6 seasons and a move!). … and this one has the Shannon Stamp of Approval!
NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT
This week is about… bomb sniffing bees LOL
TechnologyReview.com writes:
Last week, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, buzzed with the results of a rigorous study on sophisticated bomb detectors. Their research suggests that contained bees can be used to identify volatile compounds like TATP, the primary charge associated with last summer’s terrorist plot. Highly reliable and precise, these next-wave detectors are cheap to produce and easy to train.
- Apparently, in the entomologist world (entomology being the branch of zoology concerned with the study of insects) , it is common knowledge that honeybees are like little bloodhounds.
- They are great at detecting different scents of all kinds… apparently even explosives
- On the basis of this Bomb-Sniffing Bee idea, Los Almos National Laboratory launched SISP (Stealthy Insect Sensor Project) with a dude named Timothy Haarmann as the lead investigator.
- Timothy and his team have actually trained bees to “extend their proboscises–tubular organs used to suck the nectar from flowers–in the presence of explosives.”
- To layman’s eyes, it 100% looks like the bees are being kept in cages and coaxed into sticking out their tongues to lick explosive materials. … But scientists like to complicate things so I guess a bee’s tongue is called proboscises-tubular organ.
- The idea is that the bees lick the explosives and are given a treat right after. Similar to most pavlovian experiments, the bee associates the explosives with nutrients and therefore will seek out explosives…
- Now, I’m going to remind you, this isn’t the plot of one of those abysmally crappy movies that first aired on the Sci-Fi channel in the 2000’s, this is reality.
- I read a headline and saw a few seconds of a clip of these things being trained… I couldn’t believe it was real. Bees only live for a few months and the idea of releasing bees into an airport, train station, or any public space… it just didn’t seem like a practical tactic for security… but its real.
- The first factor that made me think… OK, maybe they can pull this off for real was that the training is apparently pretty easy.
- Bees are super programmable. It takes 3 hours to train about 50 honeybees.
- “If you hold up sugar water [to bees], they stick out their proboscis,” Timothy Haarmann says.
By combining a target substance with sugar water and then presenting the compound to the bee, the researchers manipulate the insects into recognizing a distinct smell. By the end of the session, successfully trained bees extend their proboscises toward explosives.
Bees trained at one concentration of vapor easily recognize lower doses. Chemist Robert Wingo, who works on the project, says that the bees proved to be more sensitive than many sophisticated man-made devices. “They are capable of detecting TATP, and the instruments I have available in the lab are not able to detect TATP,” he says.
Honeybees can also pick explosives out of more complicated bouquets–like the myriad scents that surround a typical human being. Trained bees can identify explosives whose odors were masked by “lotions, underarm deodorants, and tobacco products,” Wingo says. “Much to our surprise, the bees are capable of picking out TNT in motor oil … Even in the presence of insect repellent, we can train them to detect TNT.”
In Haarmann’s system the bees are contained in tubes so that their proboscises can be easily monitored. Unfortunately, a contained bee only lasts about two days. “We find that after about 48 hours you start to get a high mortality rate,” Haarmann says. Being confined is “hard on them.” Plus, not all bees prove to be up to the task of detecting explosives. Like dogs, some of the insects are more successfully trained than others. “We like to think of bees as these nice little robots, but there were certain bees that did better than others,” Haarmann says.
- At the University of Montana’s biological sciences division there’s a bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk… which is a cool name. BROmenshenk.
- Anyway, Bromenshenk pioneered the bee detection system. He was one of the first to train bees and bee colonies to detect stuff like explosives, meth labs, and dead bodies.
- But Bromenshenk’s training methods differ from Timothy Haarmann method.
Bromenshenk works primarily with free-flying bees that are allowed to roam large, outdoor spaces. When the bees detect the target scent, they tend to slow down and circle the area. Using audio, video, and laser systems, Bromenshenk and colleagues can analyze the flight patterns of thousands of trained bees and produce a density map indicating the most likely locations of the target substance. With tens of thousands of bees searching, they can quickly canvass an area of a mile.
But Bromenshenk says Haarmann’s “bee in a box” approach still has its place.
“Free-flying bees don’t work well in airports,” he says.
- An entomologist by the name of Jim Tumlinson from the Center for Chemical Ecology at Pennsylvania State University believes in the science of training insects (not a big shocker when you’ve dedicated your life to studying insects)… but Jim says finding a practical way to utilize trained insects is a challenge.
- Jim works with boll weevils and parasitic wasps. Researching their biomechanics to improve man-made systems. Like right now, Jim is working on a mechanical sensor that works like an insect’s antenna.
Moving from the laboratory to the real world can introduce complicated obstacles, he says. “If you’re in the laboratory, you can get these insects to respond fairly reliably,” Tumlinson says. “In any field situation, the conditions are hard to control. It gets much more difficult.” But, he says, the high sensitivity of these insects is too fascinating to ignore.
“It’s very tempting to think we can do something with it, and maybe we can,” he says. “We’re in the process of learning as much as we can about how natural systems operate.”
- There are many skeptics out there (myself included) who think the whole bomb sniffing bee project won’t work.
- But Timothy Haarmann’s SISP team have conducted field trials and they think they will be implemented within the year.
He envisions remotely controlled robots in battlefields, capable of carrying a small army of honeybees to a suspected IED (improvised explosive device) or car bomb. If the bees stick out their tongue, a bomb is close by.
“You lose a couple bees, and that’s disturbing to me,” says Haarmann, who keeps his own hives and used to teach beekeeping in South America. “But I’m the only one who is disturbed.”
Wingo, a SISP team member working with Timothy Haarmann, who had never worked with bees prior to this project, estimates that he received “hundreds” of stings during the 18-month research-gathering period. “It’s proven to be extraordinarily interesting,” he says, “but being stung is not fun.”
CREDIT:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/us/bees-learning-smell-of-bombs-with-backing-from-pentagon.html
- The Air Force Research Laboratory at Brooks Air Force Base, in Texas, has just completed an analysis of a round of tests of bees’ bomb-sniffing ability and confirmed that they found the explosive chemical more than 99 percent of the time, project scientists said.
- https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/12/07/227361/using-bees-to-detect-bombs/
- https://www.buzzaboutbees.net/bees-can-detect-bombs.html#:~:text=Through%20%27classical%20conditioning%20training%27%2C,What%20is%20this%3F
Through ‘classical conditioning training’, bees learn to associate a particular smell with food, so that they automatically stick out their tongues. In this instance then, honey bees are being trained to respond by sticking their tongues out when they sniff the aroma from explosives. What is this?
The Journal of A_C_Unit 