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