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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...
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?
No, the bees just get really pissed off by the current, and it encourages them to sting the glass.
Per the video, you can "harvest" every two weeks.
[End Of Line]
leave them bee!
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
What could possibly go wrong
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
"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.
So buy up big on Beetox (tm) futures now, and reap the rewards.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
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.
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.
I need clarification on your proposed measurement #3.
By 'Members of the Senate", do you mean:
a) The value of their lives (What the rest of us would be losing if they were to magically disappear in a Harry Potter-esque manner),
b) Their value to the rest of us (What we gain from them per capita versus what they take from us),
-or-
c) What it costs to buy one (What needs explaining?!)
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
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
some guys basically stinging their penis with bee's to make it swell up.
I've discovered that beavers can have the same effect.
*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.
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"
Hmmm, I was going to say that bees die when they sting. But that's because normally the stinger gets hooked in the victim and the bee's abdomen ruptures when the stinger is pulled off. If they're stinging glass, I suppose it's possible they could survive the experience because the stinger wouldn't get stuck.
We are the 198 proof..
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 !
"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
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
... 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.
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.
I don't think it works this way.
The story starts with a backyard apiarist doing a quick check of my hives in the middle of January. It was stinking hot. Since I was not planning on taking any real time or doing any real work I was wearing lite shoes that didn't tuck into my suit very well. Combine this with the bad choice of boxer shorts, a little bee leakage led to at least one bee in a very dangerous place.
Lifting the second box back on I lent against it leading to the worst sting I've ever experienced. I couldn't scrape the sting out in a hurry so it had lots of time to inject lots of venom (don't take your pants off while standing next to an open hive).
There was not much swelling other than a small blister. Lots of pain for days (I was reasonably immune so normally would expect no symptoms after a couple of hours at the most). It was sort of itchy but not in a way that could be scratched and any contact was uncomfortable. I've still got a scars from the sting (If chicks dig scars then try and explaining that one).
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!
I'm trying really hard to figure out if you got whooshed...
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
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.
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