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Bomb-Detecting Bees
jmichaelg writes: "The NY Times is running an article on using bees to sniff out bombs. Bees can smell scents that are diluted to a few parts per billion (the Times says "few thousand parts per trillion," but what do you expect in an innumerate society?)
The bees are trained to pass up flowers in favor of bombs within a couple of hours using sugar water as the reward. What I found to be one of the most interesting findings was that the bees communicate what the target scent is so you only need to teach a few bees what to look for and they'll pass the word on to rest of the colony. The Dept of Defense is developing a radio transmitter the size of a grain of salt they'll glue to the bees to communicate where the bomb is to the bee handlers."
when we can make...MILLIONS !
More seriously : what if some terrorist
shows up at the airport with a friend
covered by pollen and sugar ? What
would be the bee prefer ?
And how do the bee teach to each other the smell
of TNT ? The dance they perform would be
interesting to decode from the semantical
point of view (I had read stuff about how
they expressed "next left relative to sun
after the tree 20 yards from the hive" )
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
That's funny. I actually looked it up. Here's what dictionary.com said:
Trillion:
1. The cardinal number equal to 10^12.
2. Chiefly British. The cardinal number equal to 10^18.
I did not know that! I guess we'll call that "a space probe crashes into a planet accident waiting to happen"