New York Times
May 13, 2002
By Andrew C. Revkin
Scientists working for the Pentagon have trained ordinary honeybees to ignore flowers and home in on minute traces of explosives, a preliminary step toward creating a buzzing, swarming detection system that could be used to find truck bombs, land mines and other hidden explosives.
The research, under way for three years, initially focused on using bees to help clear minefields. But the effort has broadened, the scientists say. In two tests last summer, before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, trained bees picked out a truck tainted with traces of explosives.
The work is in its early stages, and bees, like bomb-sniffing dogs, have limitations. They do not work at night or in storms or cold weather, and it is hard to imagine deploying a swarm to sniff luggage in an airport. But they also have extraordinary attributes, including extreme sensitivity to scant molecular trails and the ability to cover every nook around the colony as they weave about in search of food.
Pentagon officials acknowledge that the idea of bomb-sniffing bees has a public relations problem, a “giggle factor,” as one official put it. But that official and scientists working on the project insist the idea shows great potential.
“It appears that bees are at least as sensitive or more sensitive to odors than dogs,” said Dr. Alan S. Rudolph, program manager for the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is overseeing the experimentation.
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.
In coming weeks, the team plans the first field tests of a new radio transmitter, the size of a grain of salt, that could allow individual bees to be tracked as they follow diffuse trails of bomb ingredients to a source. Such a system would help if bees were used to search a wide area for hidden explosives.
But such sophisticated technology would not be necessary at, say, a truck stop, where the clustering of alerted bees would be apparent.
Scientists involved in the project said bees were also being considered for sniffing out illicit drugs, which release more volatile chemicals into the air and are easier to trace than explosives.
For many years, biologists, notably a group at the University of Montana, have been training bees to prefer different scents, using sugar as a reward. After one bee learns the new cue, it somehow transfers that knowledge to others. Within hours, an entire hive, and sometimes adjacent hives, switch to searching for the new scent.
Scientists have found that it takes less than two hours to use sugar-water rewards to condition a hive of honeybees to eschew flowers and instead hunt for 2,4-dinitrotoluene, or DNT, a residue in TNT and other explosives, in concentrations as tiny as a few thousandths of a part per trillion.
In tests of 12 trained bee colonies last summer at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, one to two bees an hour were seen flying around uncontaminated controls, while “we were getting 1,200 bees an hour on the targets,” said Philip J. Rodacy, a chemist in the explosives technology group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Sandia, the Southwest institute and the University of Montana are among many institutions contributing to the research.
One idea is to place a hive of trained bees near important security checkpoints to guard against potential terrorists, Dr. Rudolph of the defense research agency said. But he added that much more work had to be done before that could happen.
“It’s not straightforward to move from watching bees hovering around a box to watching trucks parking in a weigh station for a minute,” he said. “This is not a capability until we know how predictable it is.”
The work is a facet of a much broader effort overseen by Dr. Rudolph to exploit the chemical sensitivity and mobility of bees, as well as moths and other insects, so they can scour broad areas for a whiff of a chemical. Over all, the Pentagon has spent $25 million since 1998 on ressearching what it calls controlled biological systems, traits of animals that might be turned into war-fighting technologies.
Scientists are also exploring whether moplike insect hairs can be used to screen the air for releases of biological or chemical weapons. Early tests have shown that bees are an efficient sampling mechanism for airborne bacterial spores, including those of a close cousin of the anthrax bacteria, said Dr. Jerry J. Bromenshenk, an entomologist at the University of Montana.
He and other researchers there have developed “smart hives” that monitor the comings and goings of the insects and, with equipment developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, sip the air as bees return, to test for explosives.
current_mood: amused
Why I’m suddenly remembering a few of my dreams, when I haven’t remembered any for years, I don’t know…
In this one, the Jackal (LAN security Nazi from work) called me at home, from his home, to harass me in cryptic fashion about something, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. He made nonsensical statements, and of course ended them with, “it will go no further” which has been proven to be an untruth at work.
Very surreal…
Coolest thing I’ve heard in a while:
Dylan Thomas reading “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
Although, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is a very close second. I didn’t realize how funny Thomas could be.
current_music: Pearl Jam – Jeremy
current_mood: happy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An economist testifying on behalf of Microsoft Corp. on Thursday had to recant his charge that strict antitrust sanctions sought by nine states against Microsoft were developed by its competitors.
University of Virginia professor Kenneth Elzinga admitted he had mischaracterized the states’ proposals in his written testimony to U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly when he said the sanctions were “developed” by Microsoft’s competitors.
Under questioning from states’ attorney Steve Kuney, Elzinga acknowledged that many of the restrictions the states wanted to impose on Microsoft were actually proposed by the original trial judge.
“Perhaps ‘supported’ was a better word than ‘developed,”‘ Elzinga conceded.
Since those two words are not even very closely related in English, is it a wonder folks think MS is not being very truthful?
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith ‘a whole I planned,
Youth shows but half: trust God: see all nor be afraid!
I can’t post from work anymore, since the LAN nazis think there’s something possibly embarrassing about LJ. Paranoid freaks.
Here’s something I thought about today while reading the news (which is allowed).
There’s a militia commander in southern Afghanistan who is giving Karzai a headache. The commander’s name is Bacha Khan. Does that make anyone else think of a Prince remake from the late 80s?
Bacha Khan, Bacha Khan…I feel for you…
current_mood: silly
Some people are referred to as being “so smart they never stop thinking so they’re hard to follow.” That’s not smart, that’s stupid. If you are expected to impart information to another, you must be smart enough to deal with your audience.
There’s a guy yapping about FTP’ing files and ATM LANs and such, when he really doesn’t need to show off how much he knows by spouting acronyms to a non-technical audience.
One of my bosses was mentioned as being too smart a while back. The catalyst was his penchant for changing his mind on major philosophical approaches for documents or test programs. The truly intelligent don’t need to show off their knowledge, and they are capable of forming an opinion or decision before telling it to others. If you can’t get your thoughts in order, you’re not intelligent, you’re scatterbrained. One need not be smart to confuse others. To enlighten others without seeming effort is a good hallmark of intelligence, though, in my opinion.
We are brought up with TV shows, books, and movies, all showing an idealized version of growing up. When we’re in our late teens and early 20s, we’re trained to think that we should be carefree and exploring the boundaries of reality and violating our own personal comfort zones.
Who really lives like that? When I was 18, I joined the army. When I was 19, I got married. I worked and worked, and by the time I was 25 I hadn’t completed a single semester of non-language college. I realized when I was 27 that I had missed something, something that everyone is brought up to expect. I had not had a wild time, I had not done anything without worrying about consequences, since I was in high school.
My rebellion included finally casting off the bad marriage that I had been too stubborn to stop even though it had been an obviously bad decision made in lust and immature emotions. I also re-started the 3-part story I had begun a decade earlier. I became heavily involved in graphic design, albeit in an unprofessional capacity. My friend Joe told me that I had to be true to myself, and being a workaday drone for the army while stuck in a loveless marriage and denying myself the companionship of my oldest friends was not true to myself. To make myself non-miserable, I had to evaluate what was important to me, and try to make me happy. If you aren’t happy, how can you be good for anyone else?
What form did your quest for lost youth take? Was it simple, was it life-altering? Have you done it yet, or are you one of those freaks from 90210 that actually had a “normal” adolescence and young adulthood? I’ve not met one yet, although some of my students a couple years ago sure seemed like TV characters…
current_mood: thoughtful
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