Tetragonula carbonaria or the sugarbag bee creates spiral hives! It is a type of stingless bee found in Australia. pic.twitter.com/A2etQVseGW

— Nature Is Weird (@NaturelsWeird) August 18, 2018

Not every bee stings. Of the 20,000 species of bees, there are over 500 of them who have lost that ability. They do, however, protect themselves in other ways, such as showering intruders with wax, plant resin, and mud. Larger predators are usually engulfed by their strength in numbers.

There are fourteen species of stingless bees native in Australia. Among the fourteen species, there stands one who is notable for their attractive beehives.

Tetragonula carbonaria, or the sugarbag bee, tend to be smaller in size compared to other stingless bees. They are predominantly black and their bodies are covered in microscopic hairs. The sugarbag bee builds hives in a distinctive spiral pattern unique to the species. The hives are broad and flat but each spiral rises in height as they turn, giving the hive a flattened conical shape. A fully developed nest may consist as many as twenty spirals.

Carbonaria bee hives have only one entrance, which is heavily protected by guard bees and coated with a mixture of beeswax and resins. Antibacterial properties from the resin clean any pathogens from the bees as they enter the hive. The substance also keeps out predators such as ants and beetles.

It is not known why the sugarbag bee make spiral hives. It may be to make air circulation better, especially since other bee colonies are not well ventilated.

Check out the photos over at the Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Nature Is Weird/ Twitter)

Some gardeners may be put off at the first sight of ants on their flowers. A new study indicates, however, that insects can be very effective at protecting crops from diseases. It even suggests that ant-derived antibiotics could be applied on a commercial scale.

Because ants live in colonies where they’re constantly in close contact with each other, there is a great potential for a disease to spread quickly among them. For this reason, ants secrete antibiotics from glands on their body. Aside from that, they also cultivate colonies of antibiotic-producing beneficial bacteria on their legs. These antibiotics can get transferred onto plants as the ants walk on them.

In a previous study, it was found that when wood ants moved into an apple orchard, there was a notable reduction in two bacterial plant diseases – namely scab and apple rot. Inspired by this finding, researchers from Denmark's Aarhus University looked through other scientific literature, uncovering evidence that ants may inhibit at least 14 such diseases. On average, throughout the various studies reviewed, the presence of ants reduced pathogen levels by 59 percent.

Amazing!

More details of the study over at New Atlas.

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This week has found more and more regions in the U.S celebrating Indigenous People’s Day. However, many more know the federal holiday as Columbus Day. Over 500 years ago, a man named Christopher Columbus “got famous for something he never did, having never even set foot on the North American continent, much less having 'discovered' it.” Perhaps Columbus should be more notorious, and infamous rather than famous, for something he did do.

It’s remarkable the lopsided stories we tell in order to conveniently ignore or deny an uncomfortable reality. As we continue to celebrate the sepia-toned world of a false past, full of men and monsters and their colonial cruelties, as entire cultures, their languages, their knowledge, and their science were destroyed along the way.

After getting lost somewhere in the Bahamas, the friendly Arawak people Columbus met helped him, bringing food, water, and gifts. He even wrote of how kind they were. Columbus repaid their generosity by mocking their “ignorance” of things they had never seen before, forcing them to be his slaves, and demanding that they lead him to the source of the gold that their earrings had been crafted from. Columbus and his men proceeded to commit brutal acts, to destroy this peaceful population, thinking “nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” One of his associates, Bartolomé de las Casas wrote: “Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight as no age can parallel. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature that now I tremble as I write.” Bartolomé de las Casas promptly quit the world to become a priest.

Some historians argue that you can’t blame Christopher Columbus for being a product of his time, which is a nice, convenient story. Nevertheless, contemporary accounts of Columbus’s senseless cruelty, and his subsequent arrest for his behavior, suggests that even taking racist historical attitudes into account, this was unspeakably barbaric. Once you know the full stomach-churning story, it’s hard to imagine how such a person, who treated whole populations as less than human, could be celebrated.

We lose something very important when we lose indigenous knowledge.

Find out what it is over at JSTOR Daily.

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When he was three months old, Ryan Le Blanc had his first dose of opioids, after surgery for a unilateral cleft palate. Now in his late 20s, the English-as-a-second language teacher has been subject to about 15 more surgeries with varying severity. With each operation that he underwent, Le Blanc was introduced to a new painkiller.

At age 14, Le Blanc started buying illegal opioids for fun. Two years later, at age 16, he would be injecting heroin, a habit that he would be carrying from high school through college graduation.

As a teenager, Le Blanc came across Bluelight.org, a drug forum now more than 20 years old. He read post after post — innumerable lines of text and images about the substances he was taking, how to take them safely, and how to quit.

Today, as the opioid epidemic worsens and claims about 130 lives daily in 2018 and in the United States alone, drug forums such as the one mentioned above are no longer just an area of interest for the forum users alone. Researchers have also taken an interest in drug forums, in hopes that they will know how to tackle the topic of drug use better.

...a cadre of researchers is looking for solutions to addiction and overdoses in the sprawl of drug forums. The researchers say that drug forums on the dark net — a catch-all for internet hubs that are often encrypted or unavailable through regular search engines — along with more mainstream counterparts like Bluelight and drug-related threads on the website Reddit, might be a medical or research tool in their own right.

More about this on Undark.

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Smaller. Lighter. Better than the original. 

That’s how Pixel Buds 2 can be described, a new version of the two-year-old Pixel Buds headphones, which Google has announced last Tuesday. Now that the new version has ditched its fabric-covered cord which used to connect the two earbuds (on the original Pixel Buds), the new version now makes a better contender against Apple’s AirPods, the Samsung Galaxy Buds, and others. But how they sound or how they work, we won’t know until 2020.

But what we can talk about right now is their design and fit, which is more important to some consumers than even sound quality, and just how much competition they already have right now.

Design is crucial when it comes to wireless earbuds. A lot of these earbuds, because of their poor design, cause inconvenience to the user.

A lot of wireless earbuds are unattractive, can sometimes fall out of people’s ears, and may involve tons of tinkering to keep them snug and comfortable.

Perhaps the reason AirPods have been a hit is because of its acceptable look, and it fits well for most users, despite the drawback in audio quality. If Google is to have a fighting chance against Apple’s AirPods, they’d have “to hit many of the same comfort and style marks”.

Check out The Verge as it compares the various wireless earbuds.

Which do you think is the best?

(Image Credit: Dan Seifert/ The Verge)

Can you guess the movie based on its foreign title? It may be perhaps one of the hardest (but fun) tests that I took online. Out of the 14 questions, I only got four (that’s not even half!). But perhaps you’ll fare better than me in the test.

Try it now on Mental Floss.

What’s your score?

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It’s important to be healthy. I believe we all know that, but more often than not, we don’t know how to get there. And there are many factors that contribute to this.

One of the factors that hinder us from achieving a healthy lifestyle is the cost of living a healthy lifestyle itself. For example, we have to pay a monthly subscription to a gym near our respective homes. Aside from that, we also have to buy the proper clothes, proper supplements, and proper water. In a way, “being healthy is a luxury,” or at least, that’s what the marketing industry would like to show us.

Thankfully, there are ways to be healthy without a cost. We just have to look around.

More of this over at Medium.com.

(Image Credit: Pexels/Pixabay)

Scientists have discovered a milk which is four times more nutritious than cow’s milk, and they have been eyeing this milk to become the new superfood that could be the key to feed our ever-expanding population. However, you might this a bit shocking. It’s cockroach milk.

A team from the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India has sequenced a protein crystal from the gut of Diploptera punctata (Pacific Beetle Cockroach), the only known cockroach to give birth to live young. To feed its offspring, the roach also produces a milk-like substance with protein crystals which have three times the energy of buffalo milk.

So are we to milk a cockroach now? Thankfully, that’s not necessarily the case.

Before you start imagining how you can milk a cockroach, the scientists have dismissed such an option and are instead sequencing the genes responsible for the production of milk protein crystals.

Whew! Thank God.

More details of this over at Big Think.

What are your thoughts on this one?

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Climate change surely have changed the world that we live in in many different ways. Storms, fires, and droughts now have worsened over the course of time. Climate change not only affects the physical world, however, as it also affects the mental health of people who witness it.

It was recently declared by the Australian Medical Association (AMA) that climate change is a health emergency. Other medical bodies around the world also reflect similar positions as the AMA.

The AMA’s statement highlights the significant impacts climate change is having on physical health, including an increase in climate-related deaths. The World Health Organisation regards climate change as “the greatest threat to global health in the 21st Century”.

Climate change can affect people’s mental health in a number of ways, both directly and indirectly.

We know experiencing extreme weather events is a risk factor for mental illness. And many thousands of people around the world are displaced from their homes as a result of climate events, putting them at perhaps even higher risk of mental illness.

More generally, people feeling distressed about the state of the planet may find themselves in a spiral of what’s been termed “eco-anxiety”.

More details of this over at The Conversation.

What are your thoughts on this one?

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When Bob Ross said, “you can do anything you want to do. This is your world,” he wasn’t joking. A Tumblr user named mochachild just proved that what Bob Ross said was true when she used the legendary boredom-killing program to paint.

Magnificent!

(Image Credit: BoredPanda)

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If you like Movie/TV filming location content, follow me, my bro & sis-in-law @youmayremembermefrom !!! PS I loved this movie, and the iconic stairs are just 1.7 miles from my apartment! #joker #jokerstairs masterful 📷 work: @hnrhasaninsta

A post shared by James May (@jamesmayname) on Oct 15, 2019 at 5:10pm PDT

What used to be a quiet spot in the Bronx, NY, now has been turned into a hotspot thanks to earnest fans of the Todd Philips film Joker.

The long stairway located at that address has recently become a tourist attraction thanks to the Todd Philips film, which features a scene where Joaquin Phoenix, decked out in his Joker costume, dances down the stairs as "Rock and Roll, Part 2" by convicted pedophile and registered sex offender Gary Glitter plays. Now, fans are flooding the Bronx to find the famous stairs and get that perfect Instagram shot denoting that they have seen a movie and liked it.

The people native to Bronx, however, voiced their distaste on social media. 

(Image Credit: jamesmayname/ Instagram)

legally as a bronx resident you're allowed and encouraged to tax anyone visiting the joker stairs

— Desus Nice (@desusnice) October 17, 2019

The housing affordability crisis — which is most acute in the Bay Area, but stretches up and down the West Coast — has greatly contributed to the homelessness crisis in states like California, Oregon, and Washington. Those who can’t afford or find stable housing anymore are forced to spend their nights inside their cars, the only major asset they have left.

California has about a quarter of the country’s homeless population, with almost 130,000 people experiencing homelessness, according to estimates from one night in January (known as a “point in time” count) from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The state’s neighbor Washington has just over 22,000 people experiencing homelessness, and Oregon has almost 14,500. Nearly half of all unsheltered people are in California, according to HUD statistics from 2018. In Los Angeles County alone, there are some 16,500 people living in vehicles. (Note that New York State has about 92,000 people experiencing homelessness, which is 17 percent of the national total).

“These folks by and large have not made any choice to experience homelessness,” said Cassie Roach, the program coordinator and senior case manager at New Beginnings Counseling Center in Santa Barbara. “They haven’t chosen to do drugs or make poor financial choices, and they’re not all alcoholics or any of those biased and ignorant assumptions people make. It tends to be folks that are dealt a really difficult hand; they’re making the best of a bad situation.”

More information about this saddening news over at Vox.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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Obese and overweight people worry about the fat around their bellies. According to a recent study which came out Thursday, however, that is not the only thing which they should be worried about. The study suggests that fat can build up in a person’s lung airways as well. This discovery may help in explaining why some health problems like asthma are more common or worse in obese and overweight people.

Researchers from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada teamed up for the study. They looked at data from an earlier project that collected lung tissue samples from people in Alberta, Canada who had been diagnosed with asthma and had died recently. This set included people who died because of their asthma as well as those who died of unrelated causes. Then they compared these samples to a control group taken from people without asthma who had died of other causes.

All told, more than 1,300 samples of the lung’s airway walls were looked at under a microscope, taken from 52 people. The authors found fat tissue in the lungs of all three groups, but those who were overweight and obese had, on average, greater levels of lung fat than everyone else. As BMI increased, the chances of more fat in the lung also increased, and both greater BMI and lung fat was linked to greater thickness and inflammation of the lung airways.

Visit Gizmodo for more details about the study.

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After posing for a selfie by standing on a ship railing, this Royal Carribean passenger, along with her companion, was banned for life from the company’s cruises.

Photos snapped by a fellow passenger some distance away show the unnamed woman in a light blue bathing suit on the outside edge of the Allure of the Seas with her hands over her head.

The Royal Carribean emailed a statement to Fast Company and stated that “security was notified and the guests were later debarked in Falmouth, Jamaica as a result of their actions and are now banned for life from sailing with Royal Caribbean.”

Glad to hear that the woman did not injure herself during her selfie.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Noticias de Cruceros/ Facebook)

In this land in Europe, techniques and recipes were honed and refined over the course of centuries. These have spread worldwide through the course of time, and millions of tourists are attracted to this land each year, as they seek the peak gastronomy. This land is Italy.

On the other hand, Italy’s international food scene leaves much to be desired. Justin Yip pulls no punches: “It’s the worst place in the world for non-Italian food.” Two years ago, he opened the first and likely only Malaysian food truck in the country.

In many ways, Yip’s truck, Sate & Sake, is the antithesis of Italy’s food culture. Selling traditional satays and currys to the robust student population of Turin, Malaysian-born Yip stands for fast-casual foreign fare in the home of three-ingredient masterpieces and the Slow Food movement.

While Yip opened up his business in hopes that he will be able to feed Asian exchange students, it’s the Italians themselves who became the backbone of his customers. In Yip’s estimate, over 90 percent of his customers are Italians. He says that he was hoping to win some Italians over, but he did not expect this many.

Know more about Yip’s life over at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image Credit: Jeremy Crowle/ Atlas Obscura)