News Revisited

Alexandros Papachristoforou of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and colleagues have published a paper in the journal Current Biology describing how the Cyprian honeybee can kill invading hornets by surrounding them in a tennis ball sized mob that suffocates the hornet.  This is unlike the Asian honeybees that kill hornets by forming a ball containing lethal temperatures.

Hong Liu, Yanzhen Fan, and Hongqiang Hu of Oregon State University have authored an article claiming to have achieved 1,500 watts of electricity from a 1 cubic meter microbial fuel cell reports ScienceDaily.  These fuel cells use bacteria to break down waste water pollutants and generate electricity and clean water in the process.  This is about 10 times the power of previous air cathode microbial fuel cells.  About 5% of electricity generated in the US is used by water and waste water treatment plants so this could be a significant development if it can be scaled up.  The current thought is that smaller systems for use by individual houses will be ready for use sooner.

Susan A. Dudley and Amanda L. File of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada have published a paper indicating that plants compete less with sibling than with strangers of the same species.  It turns out that if two plants in the same pot do not share a mother they will produce more fine root mass in an attempt to compete for water and nutrients.  However, if they do share a mother they will develop normal fine root mass.  So then the question becomes, how do they recognize their siblings?