Author: Editorial Board

Thousands of honey bees in Australia are being fitted with tiny sensors as part of a world-first research program to monitor the insects and their environment using a technique known as ‘swarm sensing’.

The research is being led by CSIRO and aims to improve honey bee pollination and productivity on farms as well as help understand the drivers of bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a condition decimating honey bee populations worldwide.

Up to 5,000 sensors, measuring 2.5mm x2.5mm are being fitted to the backs of the bees in Hobart, Tasmania, before being released into the wild. It’s the first time such large numbers of insects have been used for environmental monitoring.

“Honey bees play a vital role in the landscape through a free pollination service for agriculture, which various crops rely on to increase yields. A recent CSIRO study showed bee pollination in Faba beans can lead to a productivity increase of 17%,” CSIRO science leader Dr Paulo de Souza, who leads the swarm sensing project, said.

“Around one third of the food we eat relies on pollination, but honey bee populations around the world are crashing because of the dreaded Varroa mite and Colony Collapse Disorder. Thankfully, Australia is currently free from both of those threats.”

The research will also look at the impacts of agricultural pesticides on honey bees by monitoring insects that feed at sites with trace amounts of commonly used chemicals.

“Using this technology, we aim to understand the bee’s relationship with its environment. This should help us understand optimal productivity conditions as well as further our knowledge of the cause of colony collapse disorder,” Dr de Souza said.

The sensors are tiny Radio Frequency Identification sensors that work in a similar way to a vehicle’s e-tag, recording when the insect passes a particular checkpoint. The information is then sent remotely to a central location where researchers can use the signals from the 5,000 sensors to build a comprehensive three dimensional model and visualise how these insects move through the landscape.

“Bees are social insects that return to the same point and operate on a very predictable schedule. Any change in their behaviour indicates a change in their environment. If we can model their movements, we’ll be able to recognise very quickly when their activity shows variation and identify the cause. This will help us understand how to maximise their productivity as well as monitor for any biosecurity risks,” Dr de Souza said.

Understanding bee behaviour will give farmers and fruit growers improved management knowledge enabling them to increase the benefit received from this free pollination service. It will also help them to gain and maintain access to markets through improving the way we monitor for pests.

“We’re working with the University of Tasmania, Tasmanian Beekeepers Association, local beekeepers in Hobart and fruit growers around the state to trial the technology. Many growers rely on wild bees or the beekeepers to provide them with pollinators so they can improve their crops each year. Understanding optimal conditions for these insects will improve this process,” Dr de Souza said.

To attach the sensors, the bees are refrigerated for a short period, which puts them into a rest state long enough for the tiny sensors to be secured to their backs with an adhesive. After a few minutes, the bees awaken and are ready to return to their hive and start gathering valuable information.

“This is a non-destructive process and the sensors appear to have no impact on the bee’s ability to fly and carry out its normal duties,” Dr de Souza said.

The next stage of the project is to reduce the size of the sensors to only 1mm so they can be attached to smaller insects such as mosquitoes and fruit flies.

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A cyborg future is coming. Man’s relationship with machine is merging. Machines are an extension of our own intelligence. Soon we all will wear some kinds of bio-sensors to tell us what is happening inside us. That’s the future.

A cyborg or a cybernetic organism is a being with both biological and mechanical parts. Generally, the term “cyborg” is used to refer to a human with bionic, or robotic, implants. The beginning of cyborg creation began when HCI (human-computer interaction) started. The term cyborg is often applied to an organism that has advanced abilities due to technology. While cyborgs are commonly considered as mammals, they might also be any kind of organism. There is a hypothesis saying that cyborg technology will build up a part of the future human evolution.

The use of prostheses or implants is not a new idea. Humans have been using implanted technical aids of various types in the past to compensate for defects caused by illnesses.

Today, it is essential that the system are closely related to the living organism. Ideally, the system itself should be capable of receiving and sending the appropriate signals for the movement and control directly from the central nervous system and especially the brain itself. For instance, in vision science, direct brain implants have been used to treat non-congenital blindness. The first system included cameras mounted on glasses to send signals to the implant.

Nowadays there are two main applications of cyborg systems: (1) animal cyborgs and (2) social cyborgs.

The world’s first commercially available cyborg was an animal cyborg ant it is called the RoboRoach. The RoboRoach was officially released into production via a TED talk at the TED Global conference. Other groups have developed cyborg insects, but the RoboRoach was the first kit available to the general public.

But, what is a social cyborg? More broadly, the term “cybernetic organism” is used to describe larger networks of communication and control. For instance, cities, networks of roads, networks of software, corporations, markets, governments, and so on. A corporation can be assumed as an artificial intelligence that makes use of replaceable human components to function.

As we can see, a cyborg time is undoubtedly coming. How will it look like? Well, we guess it would bring some advancements in our lives. The ethical question should be: “Will the humans stay humans after the cybernetic revolution?

Competitors in this year’s Rolex Sydney-Hobart race fleet may need to negotiate their way around three significant ocean eddies as they sail south this year, according to oceanographers.

CSIRO’s Dr David Griffin has generated a view of the course based on observations from Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS).

The first, south-east of Jervis Bay, is the weakest of the three and may dissipate or move farther offshore between now and Boxing Day. Nevertheless, he says yachts will want to remain inshore of the eddy, other factors such as wind strength being equal.

“The second eddy is more important and extends over 180 nautical miles from 36S to about 39S,” Dr Griffin said.

“I believe it could give yachts a significant advantage of one to four hours over those that do not find this river of southward flowing tropical water.

“Finally, an isolated warm-core eddy is off Tasmania’s Freycinet Peninsula (42S), potentially giving a small boost to yachts keeping a bit further east.”

The ocean eddy off Tasmania’s east coast will be relevant to entrants in the Launceston to Hobart race, starting on December 27.

Dr Griffin provides ocean current analysis products for IMOS on a daily basis for IMOS.

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Discover black holes while you ride to work! Or hunt them down on your home computer.

‘Radio Galaxy Zoo’, launching today, is a new ‘citizen science’ project that lets anyone become a cosmic explorer.

By matching galaxy images with radio images from CSIRO’s Australia Telescope, you can work out if a galaxy has a supermassive black hole.

“It takes about a minute to learn what to do,” said CSIRO’s Dr Julie Banfield, an Australian coordinator of the international project.

“Then to actually work with the images takes only a few seconds each – perhaps a couple of minutes for the really tough ones.

“You just need match up a couple of pictures and look for what you think is the galaxy at their centre.”

Join up and you’ll be part of a community of almost a million people who work in the ‘Zooniverse’ – a set of citizen-science projects covering everything from galaxy shapes to cancer data and whale songs.

The first Zooniverse project, Galaxy Zoo, was started by astronomers Chris Lintott and Kevin Schawinski in 2006 when they were both at Oxford University.

“Galaxy Zoo and the other projects have been producing real science, science that gets published,” said CSIRO’s Dr Ivy Wong, who has been working to set up Radio Galaxy Zoo.

“Everyone, literally everyone, can now help to make discoveries.”

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A new research theory claims that we could simply live in a projection of another cosmos. How is that possible? By holographic principle, gravity comes from thin, vibrating strings. These strings are holograms of events which exist in a flatter cosmos. According to this theory, everything we experience can be assumed as events occurring in this flatter location. This is the first time the validity of the model has been mathematically tested.

The universe is a hologram and everything you can see is just a projection. This is the fact according to a controversial model proposed in 1997 by physicist Juan Maldacena. Until now the theory had never been tested. However, recent mathematical models suggest that this principle could be accurate.

The holographic principle is a characteristic of quantum gravity and string theories. It states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region. The theory is first proposed by Gerard’t Hooft and its precise string-theory interpretation is given by Leonard Susskind. By this observation, the string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in a holographic way.

In a larger scale, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be viewed as a 2-D information structure “painted” on the cosmological horizon, such that the 3-D we observe are only an effective description at macroscopic scales. In general, cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, because the cosmological horizon has a finite area and grows with time.

The holographic principle is inspired by black hole thermodynamics. This implies that the maximal entropy in any region increases with the radius squared. In such a case, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole can be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. This principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the support of string theory.

In his paper presented at the arXiv repository, a Japanese scientist Yoshifumi Hyakutake calculated the internal energy of a black hole in order to try to provide mathematical evidence for the holographic principle. He explored the boundaries of a specific black hole as well as the effects of ‘virtual particles’ which is a type of particle that is believed to continuously pop in and out of existence. In a separate paper, Professor Hyakutake calculated the energy contained inside of the alternate flatter cosmos with no gravity. Surprisingly, the computer calculations of the theoretical universe and the black hole’s boundaries matched. Some believe this is ‘compelling’ evidence of the dual nature of the universe.

Professor Maldacena reported that this fact provides hope that the gravitational properties of our universe can someday be explained by quantum theory.

Every creative writer was asked the question at least once at a social event with non-writers: “Where do you get your ideas?