ANTS REMEMBER THEIR ENEMY’S SMELL

Ant colonies are able to form what is known as a collective memory. When one ant has a fight with an intruder ant from a different colony it remembers the odor from that one ant. The ant then passes the odor of the intruder ant to the rest of the other ants in its colony. This then enables any of the other ants in the colony to recognize the intruder ant if it once again tries to fight another ant in the same            colony.    For many ant species chemicals are essential for them to be able to function as a society. Ants identify other members of their own colony by having what is called a signature chemical. This allows the ants of that colony to identify who is one of their nest – mates and who isn’t. So if any of the ants from that colony manage to pick out an unfamiliar odor that they don’t know of they are able to warn the other ants that there could be an intruder trying to enter and maybe attack the rest of the ants.    A team of researches from the university of Melbourne set out to find out whether ants were able to retain memories of the odors they have previously encountered. This team focused on the weaver ant. The weaver ants build their homes inside of trees. There can be up to five hundred thousand worker ants living inside a nest at one time. The team set up a test where ants from another nest could meet with an intruder ant from a different colony; this familiarized the ants with the intruder’s odor. Next they took twenty ants from the ant nest that another colony had been familiarized with and the intruders were attacked straight away. The ants defending their colony reacted much more aggressively towards the intruder ants that the worker ants had been familiarized with in the previous test.          B Y   N A T H A N   H E R O N         9  B L U E

Sam's 3D jaws!

A 83 year old women has received a 3d printed object jaw

The jaw was fitted in June in the Netherlands but only recently being publicised it is made from titanium powder heated and fused together by a laser one by one technicians say this is the start of 3d printing for more specific and important parts. The surgery follows research followed out at the biomedical research institute hasselt university in Belgium. And the implant was made by the laser wise company who specialises in metal parts manufacturing who are based in the same country

The patient involved had developed a chronic bone infection and doctors thought the risks were to high to operate so when the 3d printer was invented she was the first to receive the implant. The implant is really complex including articulated joints, cavities to help muscle attachment and grooves to direct the regrowth of nerves and veins the hard part was the design when finished it only took a few hours to make. Once they received the 3D digital design, the part was split up into 2D layers and then they sent those layers sections to the printing machine Ruben Wauthle LayerWises medical applications engineer told the BBC. It used a laser beam to melt thin layers of titanium powder together to build the part. This was repeated with each layer melted to the previous layer. It took 33 layers to build 1mm of height, so there were many thousand layers necessary to build this jawbone. The woman was able to go home after four days. Her new jaw weighs 107g, just over a third heavier than before, but the doctors said that she should find it easy to get used to the extra weight.

By Sam Hales

Jack C tells us about neo shields

Neo-Shield

Neo-Shield is a group of scientists who want to protect the Earth from any near comets, asteroids or any objects heading for the Earth. Germany, Britain, France, Russia and the US will all take part in experiments to find a way of protecting us from harmful objects. They will also use the different types of architecture to find which one will actually deflect the object, although some scientists will have to discover some new telescopes to find the oncoming comet as using the current ones will result in global disaster because they can’t see as far as we need them to for us to know that there’s something there to be able to prepare. One of their first ideas is to use an unused spacecraft to “pull” the asteroid off trajectory using gravity but different rocks will need different experiments to find which way is best to get them away from our planet. Another idea is to “blast” it away from us by using a nuclear bomb on the surface or near the object. This may cause the asteroid/comet to break up and hit us with little pieces instead of a large piece and this idea will be pursued by the Russians. People have recently said that this is going to be difficult to place the right device at the right time and after that the outcome won’t even be guaranteed to save us. In some extreme cases 2 ideas will have to be used as one may not work as well as it should do.

This blog is brought to you by Jack Charlesworth

Rowan's planet!

Saving our planet

Alternative to fossil fuels

Scientists have created a new genetically engineered microbe that turns algae into low carbon bio fuel. This means that instead of using fossil fuels such as coal we can use other more sustainable sources that don’t affect our planet’s enviroment as much.

Seaweed farming could be the answer to our energy dilemma. Seaweed grows 10

times faster than normal plants and are full of sugars, until recently it has been very hard to make ethanol by conventional fermentation as is already used to convert land crops such as corn and sugar into bio fuels.

New microbe research recently published in the leading journal Science, talks of “a critical technological breakthrough” that may overcome the fermentation problem.

Seaweed has been farmed for over 1000 years in China and Japan,

So adapting these into bio-fuel factories is a serious viable proposition.

The EColi microbe that is currently used on corn and sugar is ineffective on seaweed. A new microbe had to be engineered and it is this breakthrough that has got people excited.

The challenge now is to find a low carbon way of farming the seaweed that will make seaweed fuel  commercially viable and affordable for all of us.

Found on the guardian,

References taken from guardian.co.uk

Tamsin Baker takes on sport

I read this (https://owa.learnsheffield.com/OWA/redir.aspx?C=fd7c3e3e19414176bb74918294effb0a&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.co.uk%2fnews%2fscience-environment-16630588) article about how the Olympic anti-doping lab has been unveiled as the most high tech ever. I chose to read this article as I'm a keen lover of sport, so it caught my eye and I decided that it'd be a good idea to write a blog entry about. As a lover of sport, I think that all sports and all sports people, should be honest and be trusted not to take steroids or any other drug, but that isn't always possible, so they've unveiled a lab in Essex that's the size of about seven tennis courts, that they're going to use to try and stamp out drugs and banned substances in the games. I think that having this lab, will be of great use during the Olympics because the owners and sponsors GlaxoSmithKline who have donated £20 million so that the lab can be open and running twenty four hours a day. I think this is a really cool science article because it's showing that one hundred and fifty anti-doping scientists will be flown in from all over the world, just so that it's all done fairly and equally. I also liked the article because even though it doesn't say what's going to happen with the lab after the Olympics, it still shows that England is doing it's best to stamp out the substances and they're not over exaggerating that there won't be any people caught at all, they're saying that there will most likely still be people who do take the banned substances, but they'll be able to find more of the people who do it and more of the athletes whether they've won or not will be tested. Tamsin Baker :)

Underwater sounds site from Matt F

http://listentothedeep.com/acoustics/index.html

Well worth a look. Very interesting!

Listening to the Sea-Matt F

Listening to the sea…

A group of scientists from the university of Victoria in Vancouver Canada have ran a cable stretching 500miles out and back again to listen to the ocean’s animals and secrets, the US navy is not happy about this for reasons obvious. The wire runs from Vancouver Island out to connect a bunch of scientific instruments some as deep as 1.5miles the scientist are collecting huge amounts of information such as water pressure readings in hope to give them a better understanding of the world’s  oceans. But their microphones also pick up sounds from whales and shipping to the activity of the tectonic plates. It is also available to anyone with an internet connection. The scientists have placed the wire at the top of the Atlantic because of where the university is and that sound travels 5 times faster underwater so sound can travel for thousands of miles. The scientists have launched a website called listentothedeep.com which streams live sound from Vancouver and 14 other observatories across the world to your home PC. But for years the sounds of the deep sea have been observed purely by the military and were considered top secret during the cold war. The US NAVY struck a deal with the Vancouver scientists which allows the navy to censor any US NAVY operations or plans. During the cold war the US NAVY set up similar instruments across the sea bed to track soviet submarines and other possible threats to the US’ national state of security.