Odd Bob does Science...

I am doing proper science at work atm! Not that I don’t always do proper science; but normally it’s behavioural experiments (watch the bees completely fail to do what you expect them to do, or what you don’t expect them to do, or in fact anything interesting...then come back tomorrow and do it again!) Or the ‘fun’ job of writing everything up (if you can’t guess, that was sarcastic. I really don’t like writing reports)

Today however I was actually in the lab. I was even wearing a lab coat! I was doing stuff that involves acronyms that make no sense to most non-scientists (or me most of the time)! I feel strangely more scientific than normal, and in celebration of this I decided to find some odd science to blog about.

You can eat cloned meat!!

On the BBC news site the other day was the amazing news that we can eat cloned meat without becoming oddly mutated or dying of cancer or anything. (Damnit and I was looking forward to becoming a Marvel super hero!) This isn’t anything new. A pilot study back in 2005 came to exactly the same conclusion. Besides in the US many farmers breed from cloned animals to increase yields.

In the UK however we’re still a little freaked out about all this new science like GM and cloning. Then some cloned meat was accidentally sold and eaten this summer and I guess people wanted to do more checks. Besides the Soil Association were getting their knickers in a twist again. The point is that there is no significant difference between cloned and 'natural' cattle in terms of the milk and meat produced.

Will this report stop people freaking out about these 'novel foods'? Um...I doubt it. But the main argument against GM and cloning that I actually agree with is that we don't yet know enogh about the long term issues asociated with them, so I guess we have to start somewhere. Maybe one day cloned meat will be as normal to us as any other food. We cetainly have to find some way to feed our ever growing population.

I’ll probably write a fuller post about this on The Birds and the Bees at some point. It looks interesting...

In the mean time I’ll continue dreaming of some radiation/GM/other random experiment at work going horribly wrong so that I gain amazing new super powers...

Wrestling, Wasps and war paint...

When two Mexican Wrestlers square off at the start of a fight can they tell, just by looking at the mask of their opponent, who is the better fighter?


Well wrestling paper wasps can. These wasps often have patterns on their faces comprised of one or two spots:


And apparently the wasps with the most spots tend to be the better fighters! What is really surprising though is that there don’t seem to be ‘cheats’ evolving. I mean you don’t get weak deer with the biggest antlers because antlers are costly to grow and maintain, but face spots don’t look that costly right? So why don’t you get weakling wasps pretending to be stronger with spotty faces?

Well it turns out that if a wasp gets into a fight with a faker (either a weak opponent with more spots or a strong opponent with less) then they are likely to attack much more ferociously than they would against a normal opponent. So the cost isn’t in getting the spots, it’s in getting caught!

And how did scientists find this out? Well that’s where the war paint comes in. Wasps were painted to look stronger (spottier) than they really were or were given hormones to make them stronger than they looked, and then sent off to wrestle. The painted or homonally stronger bees if caught out were punished! Poor things!

Find out more?

Where are all the bees going…?

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I thought it was about time to get on to my serious interest. I mean I have several other potentially less serious interests like:

How much chocolate can one person eat at time? (I’d say lots…mmmmm :) )

Can Matt Smith make it as the new Doc Who? (Jury still out on that one…)

Can I finish editing the 80 000 words of novel I have sitting on my computer in time to get a free paperback copy? (Wish me luck!)

Will Nicky or Dovitz ever win a GP whilst I am watching?
(Yes Nicky won MotoGP in 06, but since I started following him things have gone a little bit FUBAR. I do worry that I may be to blame. I do tend to curse my puppies…)

And many more things besides…but my serious interest at the moment, the one that actually leads to me being paid, involves bees. Anyone who has seen the news recently, or watched Doctor Who for that matter, will know that honeybees are vanishing! Last winter saw honeybee losses of almost 30% in the UK! In the USA things are even worse!

The big question now is; Where are the bees going?

In Doctor Who the answer was simple. Many honeybees aren’t actually Earth Natives. They’re aliens from another planet and when they realised that Earth was in peril they did the only sensible thing and bailed. (Which makes me wonder…now that the Daleks have been defeated yet again, will they come back? The bees not the Daleks, we know the Daleks will be back!)


In the real world however things are not so simple. Which is actually a good thing for me! You see I get funding from various people who want the answer to that question. If it was a simple answer (O you know, they just don’t like us any more so they’ve moved out) then I’d have to find another research topic and more funding. As it is…(Well you see it’s a complicated combination of various potential causes all acting in synergy to lead to the gradual decline of several pollinator species, most importantly the honey bee…) I get lots of money to explore honeybee behaviour!
And what have I learned so far…

Well, quite a bit actually but here’s just 3 simple facts:
1. Bees don’t like being squeezed, caught in hair or having anything stolen from their hives when you aren’t covering them liberally in smoke…any of these offences will lead to stinging. (Ow!)
2. Putting bees in the fridge for about half an hour will make them dopey so that you can handle them! (which is cool-no pun intended-and useful for setting up various experiments).
3. Putting bees in the fridge for too long will kill them (which is not so cool and means you need to start the experiment again).

And the point of this post…where are all the bees going? Well that one we’re still working on. We’re pretty sure by now that bees aren’t heading back to their home planet, nor are they just moving out to better accommodation elsewhere. In fact large numbers of them are dying. The big question now is why? And as predicted the answer is not at all simple with causes including; disease, pesticides, bad husbandry, lack of a balanced diet, bad weather, decreased gene pool and many others besides…Which means I’m set for the next couple of years.

Don’t worry though, there is a silver lining. Whilst bee numbers in various places (including the US and the UK) are tumbling fast with no simple combatable cause, honeybee numbers elsewhere (like Scandinavia) are actually on the increase! In fact many scientists now are saying that the mass hysteria surrounding disappearing honeybees and CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) has all been taken way out proportion. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a problem (don’t stop funding bee research!) but the problem may not be as drastic as it’s been made out to be.
Which means that we can get back to worrying about a million and one other problems like; invasive alien species are taking over the world! GM crops are the work of the devil! Living causes cancer! Prophets predict end of world next year! …