Photo: Inscentinel

For a few years, a British company called Inscentinel has been developing chemical-detecting honeybees for security and sanitation purposes. Bees are trained to respond to certain smells and then are loaded into cartridges that suck in air from an object. When they alert, the user knows that the chemical is present in the sample. From the company website:

Our "sniffer bees" are honeybees trained to recognise a specific odour. They are trained using a well known Classical Pavlovian conditioning protocol - a simple association of a smell with a food reward. The insect is exposed to the odour in controlled pulses and simultaneously rewarded with sugar syrup. After three to five presentations and rewards the bee is trained. When the bee detects the odour it expects a food reward and extends its tongue (proboscis). This response is a reflex action (Proboscis extension Reflex, PER) and is not consciously controlled by the bee. A "panel" of bees can be trained in as little as a few hours to remember a particular odour for several days.

Although there are a variety of newspaper articles about this invention, I haven't found the company's claims supported by respected scientific periodicals.

Link via CrunchGear

(Video Link)

Newsweek interviewed five actors who played munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. They reminisce about the production of the movie and how it impacted their lives. Did you know that Toto got paid more than they did? You can read about the movie in Stacy's trivia post.

via io9 | Run time: 5 minutes, 38 seconds.

Photo: flickr user Ang & Nick

Botropolis (a robot-themed blog) has pictures of 10 Jack-O-Lanterns modeled to look like robots. Pictured above is Punk-O-Tron, a work by flickr user Ang & Nick. Others are inspired by Transformers, Star Wars, and Short Circuit.

http://botropolis.com/2009/10/10-awesome-robot-halloween-pumpkins/ via Gizmodo

Photo: ~toge-nyc

deviantArt user ~toge-nyc created this dragon out of plastic forks, spoons, and knives held together with glue. It took him about 80 hours complete the project. If you check out his page, you can also see some pretty cool pen-and-ink drawings.

Link via Geekologie

Image: Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Since 1967, scientific illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Honegger has visited 25 nuclear sites, including that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, documenting the mutated insects resulting from radioactive contamination. In an interview about her work, Hesse-Honegger said:

I never thought really about myself as being an artist. I just made what I thought was necessary. I thought that these laboratory flies are the prototypes of our understanding of nature, in the sense that we can do anything to nature—we the humans dictate in the end how nature should look like. It was for me the prototype of a future nature, man-made.

The professor who first gave me the mutated flies was convinced, however, that the radiation from Chernobyl had no impact on nature. This is what brought up the question of “low-level radiation.” Nobody was interested in doing research; this is why I thought I had to make these paintings to show the scientists that it would be important to start research in fallout areas.

Link via Fast Company | Interview with the Artist

Matt Kaplan writes in National Geographic about a new study that suggests a link between a person's olfactory sensitivity and awareness of the emotions of other people. Denise Chen of Rice University in Texas led the research process:

Women have a more uniform sense of smell than men, and are also thought to be more sensitive to emotional cues.

So Chen and graduate student Wen Zhou presented 22 pairs of young women living in university dormitories with identical t-shirts to sleep in.

After being worn for one night, the t-shirts were later presented to the same women to smell.

Each woman was given three t-shirts and informed that one of the shirts had been worn by her roommate, and that the other two had been worn by other university students.

The subjects were asked to identify the shirt that had been worn by their roommate.

The women then took a series of recognized emotional-sensitivity tests.

Subjects who correctly selected the t-shirt worn by their roommates tended to score high on the emotional tests.

Link | Photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Image: National Geographic

The above image is a selection and compression of an enormous interactive map of the almost two hundred manned and unmanned exploratory missions in our solar system over the past fifty years. It was created by graphic designers Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic. Click on the link and use the box in the upper-right corner of the screen to choose what area you'd like to see, and zoom as needed.

Link via OhGimzo!

Photo: OLPC

The One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) hopes to distribute a simple but useful laptop computer to impoverished children in developing nations at a very low cost per unit. One recurring problem in the project has been power supply. So the Afghan IT company Paiwastoon has developed this prototype pedalling machine that allows the user to crank electricity into the computer.

Link via CrunchGear | Paiwastoon

Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that a new published study reveals substantial differences between how dyslexia impacts English and Chinese-language readers:

English speakers who have developmental dyslexia usually don't have trouble recognizing letters visually, but rather just have a hard time connecting them to their sounds.

What about languages based on full-word characters rather than sound-carrying letters? Researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children have discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception.

The pronunciation of detailed and complex Chinese characters must be memorized, rather than sounded out like words in alphabet-based languages. That requirement led researchers to suspect that disabilities in the visual realm might come into play in dyslexia in that language. "A fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be preformed by the visual system in order to activate the characters' phonological and semantic information," said lead author Wai Ting Siok of the University of Hong Kong, in a prepared statement.

Link | Image: NASA

You might or might not consider this to be good news. Enrico Grasso of the University Hospital Tor Vergata in Rome, Italy, has developed a pill-sized robot that can crawl around inside a patient, searching for signs of cancer. Alastair Jamieson writes in The Daily Telegraph:

Pills containing cameras already exist, but this is believed to be the first that can be controlled after it has been swallowed.

Once the examination has finished, the spider pill exits the body naturally.

It has been successfully tested on pigs but further trials will be needed before it can be cleared for use by doctors.

Elisa Buselli, one of the scientists working on the project that created the spider pill, said: “This should improve the situation not just for the patient but also the doctor.”

Link via Popular Science | Image: BBC News

Although the story was first composed as a radio script, the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published 30 years ago today. Fans in Britain are marking the occasion by wearing dressing gowns and carrying towels. Chris Irvine writes in The Daily Telegraph:

Hitchcon’09, the fans' convention at the Royal Festival Hall contained a spacesuit worn by a Vogon, the galactic galaxy's bureaucrats notorious for their aggressive manner and terrible poetry, as well as Adams' bath, where the author, who died in 2001, claimed to have some of his best ideas.[...]

The Hitchhiker books began as a Radio 4 comedy show in 1978. Adams then adapted the radio series to create the initial book, completing four more instalments over the next 20 years. He died of a heart attack in 2001, which writing The Salmon of Doubt, published post humously.

Link via GeekDad | Image: Random House

(YouTube Link)

Sean Michael Ragan of Make magazine declares that with this video by inventor Patrick Brawley, steampunk has 'jumped the shark':

Introducing the Electro-Flush! Technically, TeslaPunk Urinal. Hand-made solid oak tank with battery powered flush pump, laser aiming assist (aim at the laser dot in the bowl at night), lights, antique gauges, flush capacitor, and cup holder. Bowl is a round 1949 Standard.

via Make

Image: Marc Quinn

Artist Marc Quinn created a self portrait sculpted out of 4.5 liters of his own frozen blood. He plans to repeat the process every five years to show the aging process.

Quinn has achieved fame (or infamy, depending your perspective) for other provocative works of art, such as a golden statue of Kate Moss in a yoga pose. He's been previously featured on Neatorama for more mundane work: a botanical garden.

Link via Make

(Video Link)

This video describes a banner consisting of LED tubes and sophisticated sensors that graces the atrium at one of the buildings on Microsoft's campus. It was designed by Mode Studios in order to encourage creativity and envision dynamic systems. What's on the screen changes with the weather and traffic patterns inside the atrium. There's also a "hot spot" where a person can control what's on the screen through body movements and temperature.

Via Gizmodo | Mode Studios Website

Image: Facebook

Jason Kinkaid writes at Tech Crunch that Facebook has developed a new application that aggregates the published emotional states of users over time. The relative contentment that users express constitutes "Gross National Happiness":

Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook, which is all anonymized before its analyzed. To determine if a particular status message is happy or sad (or neither), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment.

You can adjust the graph by sliding the bar at the bottom of the screen. You can also adjust the zoom by dragging the handlebars on the slider, and can actually watch happiness jump hour-to-hour, though it’s a bit difficult to navigate when you’re zoomed in that far. It’s fun to play around with, but you aren’t going to find many surprises: happiness generally hits a low on Mondays, then gradually grows up through the weekend when it drops again as the work-week begins. Peaks are all found around holidays, with Thanksgiving drawing the most happiness. Also worth nothing: this year there was an abrupt drop in happiness in late June, which is likely associated with the tragic death of Michael Jackson.

Link via Fast Company