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Bee Venom Has "Botox-Like Effect," Is Worth 7 Times As Much As Gold
dryriver writes "The BBC reports that cosmetic products using bee venom as an ingredient are a new 'hot seller' in the cosmetics market. Bee venom is said to have an effect on female skin similar to Botox injections, tightening the skin and making wrinkles and other signs of aging appear less pronounced than before. Unlike Botox, however, bee venom does not need to be injected, and can be absorbed through the skin naturally as an ingredient of cosmetic skin creme. Now comes the kicker: A special electrified device that causes bees to sting a synthetic membrane and release their venom can harvest about one gram of bee venom from 20 bee hives. That one gram of bee venom is worth a whopping 350 dollars. This makes bee venom almost seven times more valuable than gold, which, in comparison, is worth only about 53 dollars per gram."
FTFS:
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I think we've finally found the real reason why honey bees are disappearing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin#Links_to_deaths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin#Side_effects
There Can Be Only One...
Why not just read the summary?
Unlike Botox, however, bee venom does not need to be injected, and can be absorbed through the skin naturally as an ingredient of cosmetic skin creme.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
It would be a real downer if you electrified and killed your entire hive. If not, I can see a new industry of steeling other people's bee sting toxin and an ancillary industry of armed bee hive guards.
I mean just look at what nanotechnology has brought us so far! Um, oh wait...
You mean something like a handheld computer that can make phone calls, surf the internet, play games, and all weighs less than a pound? Oh, and is so ubiquitous that even your grandma might have one?
:(
If only that had happened we could say nanotechnology was a success
Instead of producing it from bees for $350/g, you could put the appropriate genes into some E. coli and have them produce it for 20% of that price or less. But of course then you wouldn't be able to sell it for $350/g.
Why female skin is a more apt question.
Does it not work for guys or is it an assumption that guys aren't interested in looking younger?
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
This is Slashdot. We have a proud tradition of not reading the articles, summaries, or even headlines, and then spouting inaccurate, misinformed idiocy and feeling smug about what "experts" we are.
Bee's die after stinging, which means that you're losing twenty hives of bees for only $350. That sounds like a huge loss to any bee keeper. That also seems like a hell of a lose of bees that are already suffering from sudden colony collapse... Am I wrong here?
leave them bee!
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
I've gotta stock up on bee venom quick! Before we fall over the fiscal cliff!
What could possibly go wrong
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
Some of them will make claims that sound superficially similar, but which will really produce the "Buttocks like effect" rather "Botox like effect".
"This makes Bee Venom almost seven times more valuable than Gold, which, in comparison, is worth only about 53 Dollars per 1 gram."
So it costs the same as ink for my printer, data for my cellphone, gas for my car (soon), and clean drinking water (later).
...omphaloskepsis often...
your celphone is not nanotech
Man, I wonder how much and what animal venom they use in my ink jet printer cartridges...
does it work on neckbeards??
Considering the price of the active ingredient i think it's fair to assume that the quantities in any anti-ageing product will be about as effective as any current venomless skin cream, maybe they feel that, since women are already very used to convincing themselves of the efficacy of some made up or at least utterly useless new wonder molecule they're also most likely to feel the effects of any bee venom branded moisturisers.
Is the bleach to kill germs and bacteria or does it do something for looks? Doesn't that burn?
So buy up big on Beetox (tm) futures now, and reap the rewards.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Yes, men use botox, often with less than optimal results, e.g. Bruce Jenner (google)
I'm glad bee venom is worth something, perhaps it will inspire people to try stave off the great bee die off. However I don't give a damn what wasp, hornet, or yellow jacket venom is worth, if I see one in the wrong place it's going to die a horrible death. Dammit
Perhaps due to limited / patent-restricted availability of the extraction method.
The price will likely decrease, when owners of large bee colonies start figuring out ways of capitalizing on this.
Or when biotech folks come up with a way of producing "synthetic" bee venom, grown by bacteria infused with genes extracted from the bees.
and then we exhaust all the bees in the world for this new oil, suddenly our ecosystem is missing part of its cycle (pollination). A world in ruins, all for artificial, emotionless yet pretty, faces.
There are a ton of products more valuable than gold. I don't understand why that is a big deal. Hopefully this makes honey cheaper with the extra source of income.
I just saw fresh whole (not ground) wasabi root for sale in a Japanese market in Los Angeles for $149 a pound. A one inch diameter piece 3/4 inch long was around $9. The second most expensive food I found was Spanish Blue Fin tuna for $55 a pound.
Why is Snark Required?
And you thought bee venom was expensive? Just wait until you see the prices of HP 3D Printer Bee Venom Cartridges.
Well, this will certainly aggravate the Vegans, who believe that honey is not "vegan" because we are enslaving the bee.
http://www.vegetus.org/honey/honey.htm
Though I'm sure they happily eat fruits and vegetables that are pollinated with domesticated bees that farmers have "enslaved"...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I don't understand this gold thing against which the commercial value of this bee sting is being compared. Please express this in terms of:
1. Bags of potato fries (for fitness conscious folks) /. (I wish this one was)
2. The average software patent (for nerds like us)
3. Members of the senate (who care so much for us)
4. iPhones (everyone seems to want one)
5. Windows 8 licenses (see above)
6. First posts on
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
That must be what they use to make inkjet printer ink.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
Bee's venom can kill by inducing shock in allergic subjects.
It looks like it has a very nasty property of being a potential allergenic (I hope I got the correct term. If not, sorry) meaning: once you get stinged, you may become allergic to venom even if before you weren't. This in sufficently predisposed subjects.
And now it is going to be the golden ingredient for some cosmetic? I hope it is going to be subjected to some form of medical control, to say the least.
But I'm no chemist nor biologist so I may be completely wrong.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
This reminds me of an urban legend (or maybe I just watched it on Fox) about some guys basically stinging their penis with bee's to make it swell up.
Wow! That makes it worth almost 1 percent its weight in inkjet printer ink.
This space available.
I imagine that people with serious bee sting allergies are best advised to avoid this treatment.
to have an effect on female skin
Male skin is not affected, thusly.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Now we know who's been stealing all those bees that have been "Disappearing" around the world ;-)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
You, know, just monkey around with their DNA a bit, to produce bees that pump out a gallon or four liters of venom per sting?
This is done in bad science fiction films all the time. Start doing underground nuclear tests again with beehives. Or zap them with Gamma Rays.
But be careful not to get them too angry.
And tell chicks that want better skin to just go stick their heads in a beehive.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
*whispers*: Platypus venom.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Botox injections, tightening the skin and making wrinkles and other signs of aging appear less pronounced...
Botulinum toxin does not tighten the skin - it paralyses muscles, and since many wrinkles are aggravated by muscles in the skin, paralysing them can make the wrinkles less pronounced. This paralysis is very evident on the faces of many aging celebrities - they simply struggle with producing facial expressions.
It's a strange thing, isn't it? Instead of accepting their age, people mistreat themselves so they look 'younger', at least when you're not too close. I think it is deeply sad; and it only makes you look less attractive.
Nevertheless you parent is right, it is not nanotech ;D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Everything and it's dog is nanotech since the definition shifted. Sunscreen gets called nanotech just because it has sub-micron particles suspended in it. So while it may not fit your definition or mine, it's shorthand for anything small for some people now (even if the sizes are in the hundreds of microns).
With the right marketing guys could be a far bigger market:
"My balls are as smooth as pearls, and you know how much women love pearls"
Jesus Tits - STOP - Our bee numbers are already fucked up as it is. When you extract venom from a BEE, it KILLS the BEE, right now we NEED bees for other things like growing FOOD to EAT, not to be sacrificed instead to your clueless, moral-less ego and vanity! I don't really give a fuck if you CAN do it, you SHOULDN'T because it's WRONG!
Some people may want to harvest the bee venom themselves... but provided that most of people confuse bees and wasps, that may be dangerous (yes, Maya the bee is actually a wasp).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I can't say I know how the bees feel when electricity is applied to them so that they can produce the venom, but I can tell you that it wouldn't be pleasant.
In China and in Vietnam people "harvest" bear gall bladder juice by tying up live bears and inserting a tube into the bears - and that practice is deemed "cruelty to animal".
Should electrocuting bees be considered as cruel, as well?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You're getting better at these APK posts. You still need more practice, though. It's too coherent, too rational, and not nearly hysterical enough. Imagine that you've gotten no sleep for several days and you just got high. Now that you're starting to get into character, you need to remember that every APK post needs to mention HOSTS files, Drinkypoo, and gmhowell.
Also, for the proper kook factor, you need to randomly capitalize, italicize, and bold at least one word in every single sentence. You also need to post a shitload of random URLs. They can all go to goatse. It's not really important. Finally, remember to proclaim yourself to have pwned everyone on Slashdot.
For maximum amusement factor, reply to yourself a few times, arguing back and forth about who the real APK is.
"My balls are as smooth as pearls, and you know how much women love pearls"
Not to mention their love for the necklace you can make with them.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
"My balls are as smooth as pearls, and you know how much women love pearls"
Not to mention their love for the necklace you can make with them.
And they'll want rather more than two of them to make a decent necklace...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
With this cosmetics discovery we are finally going to see some real progress towards research and policy changes to protect against bee colony collapse.
If it is effective on female skin, it is probably also effective on male skin. But maybe not as effective; male skin is thicker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans#Skin_and_hair) so it may need a stronger dose?
It's made of components that are assembled at the nanotech level, so why isn't it? (asking the question genuinely as I suspect there's some definition for nanotechnology that we obviously don't know).
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I'll have you know that I'm an expert on bee venom and bee venom accessories.
Then per Slashdot bylaws, you are not permitted to post in this thread.
... that they'd have a potent toxin injected in them just to make them look a few years younger. Female vanity apparently has no bounds. Or at least we haven't found them yet.
1 + 1 most certainly does not equal 3, you imbecile!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
P.S. => I already wax and bleach my asshole and encourage everyone else to do the same.
OK... but don't expect all of us to wax and bleach your asshole for free.
Colony collapse disorder? Failure of crop pollenation worldwide? The possible end of agriculture and mass starvations and food riots worldwide? None of that was important enough to save the bees.
But now, shit, the bees might be able to keep aging Baby Boomers looking young! Nothing can compete with that, the bees are SAVED!
Women are just far more likely to buy any shit that promises weight loss or younger skin.
I'm trying really hard to figure out if you got whooshed...
Rush Limbaugh ... has used Viagra ...
Thank you for sharing that delightful holiday image with us at Christmas.
First you have to know which compound of the venom are the active ingredient (a venom is not a single molecule, it's a big mix of lots of substances).
Maybe the important part are just small peptide (works also for small nucleic acid strands). In this case, yes: just slap the gene inside a bacteria or yeast and just harvest the thing in a huge brewery tank. This will cost a tiny fraction of the current method. (as in "a few bucks for a dozen of kilograms"). Washing industry thrives on this kind of process and has already made it fucking incredibly cheap (do you really think that the digestive enzyme in your washing powder where harvested from actual animals ?)
But maybe not. Maybe it can be a complex protein that requires some post processing (chaperone helping to fold it into an unusual shape, enzyme modifying some parts) - (but very unlikely. If the venom can cross the skin without injection, it needs to be something small). Or maybe it can be a small chemical molecule that is produced by a long and complex chain of chemical reaction necessitating a big collection of enzymes (very likely, given that it can easily cross the skin).
In this case you need to identify the candidate, understand the process that produce it (not impossible but it takes time), and then either put the whole machinery inside yeast (bacteria post-process a lot less their proteins) and go for the brewery-tank method, or replicate the synthesis in another way (produce the protein in bacteria and then do the modification in a lab. Or find a way to synthetise the small chemical compound by using a sequence of chemical reactions in a lab) and scale it up to industrial scale.
This *WILL* end up being incredibly cheap in the long term, but requires much more research and development.
There's a whole branch of science to study that, called "Venomics".
Until then, you're stuck at putting bee on a micro electric chair until they are so pissed of that they start stinging the glass.
(And I'm betting that perhaps, all the benefit come from the few traces of adrenalin-like substance that the bee end-up secreting after going through such predicament and of which a small part might end up in the venom itself).
But the fact that they extract only a gram from a whole hive, means that they are probably concentrating/extracting the product already, so they know already a few tips in which direction to look to find the interresting part.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nanotechnology, as I understand it, is about building entire machines out of atoms, on a nanoscale. This would allow us to interact with the world in a completely different way, for instance, physically ripping bacteria apart instead of trying to kill them with chemicals. So a cell phone doesn't fit the description: even though transistors can be measured in nanometers, the whole CPU, let alone the cell phone, is far beyond the nanoscale.
I'm not an expert. You could just read about it on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology
The SoC is.
Female skin apparently has a slightly lower pH than male skin, although I'm not sure why. I don't know if that makes a difference on the effectiveness of the venom, but it may. Bee sting is acidic[1] and so the effect of a bee string is probably slightly strong for women than for men, as their natural skin pH won't neutralise it (conversely, a wasp sting will be milder, as wasp sting is alkaline). Of course, it may just be that they only tested it with women because that's a larger market for cosmetics.
[1] Baking soda for a bee sting, vinegar for a vasp sting, as I recall remembering as a child.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Bee-cause it's bee venom silly! Now quit asking perfectly logical questions.
Female skin apparently has a slightly lower pH than male skin, although I'm not sure why.
Duh... it's lower because of the bee venom cream they apply every morning.
Younger looking females are in more advantageous position in the mating process. On the other hand, older males are seen as more stable and more likely to have the means to support.
Actually, it does, for large values of 1 and small values of 3.
- Mike
I wouldn't. This is the "flavor of the year" kind of a thing, and next year people will move on. It's far too expensive for mass consumption, not easy to mass produce, and to get this to bring in big money you'd have to be able to synthesize it somehow with process that can be used to mass production.
Which in turn would bring the price down.
Else people will just stick to what works and is reasonably cheap, with a few ultra rich maybe using this until they find the next fad.
I disagree. People spend money on gold facial masks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Tmycixsh8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLrurC4dtUY
and some idiots pay for silver facials and gels, which will actually result in argyria (turn your skin blue - literally) if you do it too many times:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhQgFc_bec4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDW799FhVJ0
Examples of argyria:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahihGKZC5Kk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnXdk3Kmq9s
Now granted those are some extreme examples, but ever notice many women's earlobes have a small greyish spec at the bottom of the piercing? This is from silver compounds being absorbed into the skin. Same thing.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin#Links_to_deaths
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin#Side_effects
Woah that's bad. Good thing nobody's ever been harmed by a bee sting!
Well, as a man I know that I do find the recession of my hairline somewhat disturbing, moreso than a few wrinkles etc.
The extra bulges in various parts is also somewhat of a concern.
I doubt I'm the only man with such concerns. Hair-loss is an especially-sensitive topic for many men.
I think you're speaking for yourself there pal.
The electricity is in fact used for halogen lights, and on the other side of the glass are some Queen bees in lurid poses. Not one of my proudest moments, having to clean the glass and collect the 'venom'.
Just goes to show, women will put anything on their skin to look younger.
I'm trying really hard to figure out if you got whooshed...
Not so much a whoosh, more of a splorked or splooged kind of sound effect.
yes, those people need to be replaced.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Here is a useful GMO usage. Take the bee gene that produce the venom, implant it in some yeast or bacterial, and produce cheap bee venom from an incubator.
But here comes the dark side of GMO (well, one of them): either big pharma will patent the gene, or it will not happen