[ocba] Fwd: Science News / Sting Operation

Lewis Cauble Lewis at hivebody.com
Sun Sep 21 21:46:11 EDT 2008


> A nice article sent to me by a friend.

Lewis


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Greenstone Gardens <greenstone.gardens.nc at gmail.com>
> Date: September 20, 2008 8:13:38 AM EDT
> To: Lewis Cauble <Lewis at hivebody.com>
> Subject: Science News / Sting Operation
>
>
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> In This Issue
> Last Call: The final mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, set for  
> early October, could radically transform the observatory, but the  
> crew faces some special challenges
> Breaking the Barrier: A technique combining ultrasound pulses with  
> microbubbles may help scientists move therapeutic drugs across the  
> brain’s protective divide
> Sting Operation: Scientists use bees and wasps to sniff out the  
> illicit and the dangerous
> This week's table of contents
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>               	Home / September 27th, 2008; Vol.174 #7 / Feature
> STING OPERATION
> By Susan GaidosSeptember 27th, 2008; Vol.174 #7 (p. 16)  Text  
> Size     Scientists use bees and wasps to sniff out the illicit and  
> the dangerousENLARGE | A honeybee receives a fragrant reminder of  
> its target scent each morning and responds by sticking out its  
> proboscis.Leroy N. Sanchez, Los Alamos National Lab
>
> It's the ultimate way to pull off a sting: Teach a group of  
> ordinary honeybees to ignore flowers and,  instead, focus on vapors  
> from explosives used in bombs. Then send the bees off in teams to  
> sniff out terrorists. Or track the molecular trail of illicit  
> drugs, or even point police to a rotting corpse.
>
> In recent years, researchers have shown that with just a few  
> minutes of training, undercover bees can detect the smell of TNT,  
> methamphetamine or almost any other scent just as the bees would  
> respond to pollen. Wasps’ sniffing abilities may also be put to  
> use finding bodies in search-and-rescue missions or helping farmers  
> track infestations that, unchecked, could lead to crop failure or  
> foodborne illness.
>
>
> Based on these findings, scientists have begun devising an array of  
> chemical detection devices that exploit the insects’ powerful  
> sense for scents. At Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico,  
> researchers are putting bees to work in a portable system that,  
> like a trained police dog, could sniff out drugs and bombs at  
> airports, border crossings, military installations and schools. A  
> similar device, called the Wasp Hound, is under development at the  
> University of Georgia. And a British company is working on insect- 
> based detection systems to find explosives in luggage or minefields.
>
> “The general premise is, if it smells, we believe we can train our  
> bees to detect it,” says chemist Robert Wingo of Los Alamos’  
> Stealthy Insect Sensor Project.
>
>
> Wingo says insects are not only cheaper to keep and quicker to  
> train than dogs, but also can pick up scents that canines can’t  
> detect. In some cases, the bees perform better than instruments  
> used in the lab.
>
> While these insect abilities have long attracted interest from  
> military and security personnel on the lookout for highly sensitive  
> and portable devices, the concept has been slow to gain favor in  
> the scientific community. Even though insect-based devices have  
> performed well in laboratory settings and controlled field studies,  
> some scientists question whether these devices can be used as  
> reliably as other sensors.
>
> Glen Rains of the University of Georgia’s Tifton campus, who co- 
> leads the Wasp Hound project, outlined these concerns in the June  
> Trends in Biotechnology. “Not only is there a laugh factor in  
> working with insects, but biological systems are sometimes known to  
> be unreliable,” he says. “Even search dogs—which are  
> considered the gold standard in the industry—can get tired, bored  
> or cold.”
>
>
> Still, no one denies that insects have a phenomenal sense of smell.  
> Their antennae are covered with thousands of microscopic sensors,  
> allowing them to pick up the faintest odors. Bees, wasps and even  
> moths can learn and remember a wide range of target odors, making  
> them ideal for use in chemical detection systems.
>
> Now several laboratories are stepping up efforts to test insect  
> devices in real-world conditions. Scientists say the studies will  
> provide empirical evidence needed to make the devices more widely  
> accepted as biological sensors. If all goes well, commercial insect  
> sniffing devices may become available within a year.
>
>
> Buzz bombs and stinger missiles
>
> Military uses for honeybees and other insects date back to ancient  
> times. The Romans used catapults with beehives as projectiles, to  
> unleash the fury of angry bees on the enemy. During World War I,  
> beehives were rigged to topple with trip wires to thwart an  
> approaching enemy.
>
>
> More recent studies on honeybees and other foraging insects show  
> these small, winged creatures possess other traits that can sting  
> enemy agents. For example, despite their tiny brains, honeybees are  
> quite intelligent and can be easily trained using classical  
> conditioning techniques. Just like Pavlov’s dogs, which learned to  
> associate a ringing bell with dinner, bees and wasps can be trained  
> to associate a smell—vapors, say, of a liquid explosive or  
> decaying corpse—with a sugary treat.
>
> In the early 1990s, the U.S. military began studying ways to use  
> free-flying bees to help search for hidden explosives. The idea was  
> to train the bees to prefer the scent of a particular explosive,  
> and then set them free in the hope that they would hover over any  
> nearby threats.
>
> “The problem was, it’s hard to track a bee whizzing by at 15  
> miles per hour,” Wingo says. Never mind  tracking a large group.  
> “Technologically, it’s an extraordinary challenge. Number two:  
> How do you prove the associative conditioning?”
>
ENLARGE | Through Pavlovian conditioning, wasps can learn to  
associate odors with food. These wasps display food-searching  
behavior when presented with the odor alone.Rains et al.
> Enter Tim Haarmann, an entomologist working at Los Alamos at the  
> time. With Wingo and microbiologist Kirsten Taylor-McCabe, also of  
> Los Alamos, Haarmann found a more practical way to harness  
> honeybees’ scent-abilities by restraining and individually  
> training bees in a box. The team then combined insect behavior and  
> technology to track the bees’ responses. The result: a portable  
> device with a team of five bees as its sensor.
>
> The bee bomb detector is about half the size of a shoe box and  
> weighs roughly two kilograms (four pounds). From the outside, it  
> looks like a plain box with a few air holes. Inside, lined up in a  
> row and strapped into strawlike tubes, bees are exposed to puffs of  
> air as a video camera monitors their reactions. The camera is tied  
> to pattern-recognition software that signals when a bee responds to  
> a scent.
>
> A, Bee, C’s of detection training
>
> Though bees can’t bark when they encounter a target scent, they do  
> have a way of communicating that the camera can catch. It turns out  
> that a hungry bee will stick out its tongue in anticipation of a  
> meal. Bees will also stick out their tongues when a drop of sugar  
> water is touched to their antennae. Pair the sugar drop with the  
> scent of TNT or C-4 plastic explosives half a dozen times, and the  
> bees will extend their tongues at a whiff of the explosives alone.  
> This response, called the proboscis extension reflex, can assess  
> the bees’ reaction to a particular scent.
>
> “A honeybee will not stick out its tongue for any other reason  
> than to eat. So we can train bees to associate food with a  
> particular scent,” Taylor-McCabe says. “It’s an unambiguous  
> signal that the honeybee gives us to indicate yes or no.”\
>
>
> Wingo and Taylor-McCabe are using this approach to train forager  
> bees to detect a wide range of compounds, including methamphetamine  
> and cocaine. The honeybees can even detect triacetone triperoxide,  
> or TATP, an explosive that canines often have trouble detecting.  
> TATP was the detonator carried by the “shoe bomber” in his  
> attempt to destroy a commercial aircraft with plastic explosives in  
> his shoe.
>
> Bees can be trained to detect multiple scents and taught to pick up  
> a single scent from a bouquet. The bees can also pick up the scant  
> molecular trail of vapors too faint to be detected by lab  
> instruments. In trials at Los Alamos, the bee detectives performed  
> better at detecting minute traces of explosives than ion mobility  
> spectrometers, which are used to swipe luggage and clothing in  
> airports.
>
>
> “We haven’t quantified exactly how low their threshold is, but  
> the bees are able to detect the explosives at concentrations below  
> that stated of the detection instruments in our lab, and that’s  
> generally in the low parts per trillion,” Wingo says.
>
> A British firm, Inscentinel Ltd., is developing a bee-based  
> detection device that relies on a team of 36 bees. Mathilde Briens,  
> research and development manager, says the company is investigating  
> ways to pack twice that many bees in a single unit, allowing them  
> to screen up to a dozen chemicals at once.
>
>
> “It’s mainly an engineering issue,” she says. “We need to  
> make sure all the bees are exposed to the scent and find ways to  
> manage all the bees so we know when they are responding.”
>
> Dances with wasps
>
>
> While wasps don’t stick out their tongues in response to a scent,  
> they do communicate with each other—through dance. The University  
> of Georgia’s Rains and his collaborators have developed a small,  
> portable odor detector that relies on the body movements of tiny  
> black wasps called Microplitis croceipes to sense odorants. Also  
> known as parasitic wasps, these social bugs use their keen sense of  
> smell to seek out meals and find a host in which to implant their  
> offspring. If their efforts prove successful, they signal the news  
> to peers through a series of carefully choreographed movements— 
> with different dances to signal food versus host.
>
> Rains’ group is exploiting the wide range of such movements to  
> build biological sensors with wasps capable of detecting more than  
> one odor. For example, a wasp trained to associate a specific odor  
> with a food reward will press its antennae down onto the source of  
> an odor. If scientists present a different target odor while the  
> wasp is stinging its host, the wasp will display coiling behavior,  
> rearing up on its hind legs and bending its antennae the next time  
> it encounters that scent.
>
>
> Similar to the bee-based detector, the Wasp Hound houses a team of  
> trained wasps in a handheld, ventilated cartridge. At one end of  
> the cartridge, a small fan draws outside air through a hole. If the  
> wasps don’t recognize an incoming odor, they continue flying  
> about. If they do recognize the scent, they cluster around the  
> opening, where a miniature video camera records their movements and  
> sends images to a laptop for analysis.
>
> In an early field trial designed to compare the detection limits of  
> the Wasp Hound to an “electronic nose,” the insect detector  
> proved to be 74 times more sensitive to fungi than the mechanical  
> device, and 94 times more sensitive to plant odors. That study  
> appeared in Transactions of the ASAE in 2004.
>
> Rains and his collaborators are now working to make the device even  
> more sensitive. Don Kulasiri of Lincoln University in Christchurch,  
> New Zealand, is developing mathematical models that will enable him  
> and his peers to better understand and interpret insect responses.
>
>
> By analyzing the wasps’ responses to chemical stimuli at different  
> concentrations and tracking any resulting changes in their  
> behavior, the scientists aim to develop a device that not only  
> detects a specified chemical but also can accurately measure its  
> concentration.
>
> “What that holds for us is potentially developing a device  
> that’s not just yes-or-no but is concentration-specific to some  
> level,” says Rains, who along with his colleagues, reviews the  
> efforts in the August Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata.
>
>
> Ideally, the scientists say, the device could be carried into farm  
> fields and grain stores to check for contaminants and disease. The  
> group is now using a prototype Wasp Hound to detect aflatoxin, a  
> toxin produced by a fungus that grows on peanuts, corn and other  
> plants. Trials suggest the device may provide a better way of  
> detecting the toxin before crops enter the food supply, Rains says.
>
> “Current detection methods rely on just a subsample of a large  
> quantity of material, so there’s a possibility of missing it when  
> it’s there,” he says. The group is also investigating ways to  
> detect infestations of E. coli, salmonella and other food  
> contaminants. The Wasp Hound may also be used for security and  
> forensics, and has the potential to detect volatile compounds in  
> human breath associated with diseases such as cancer and  
> tuberculosis, Rains says.
>
> Giving it the sniff test
>
>
> Though insect sensing systems have performed well in laboratory  
> settings and controlled field studies, the devices have yet to  
> prove themselves to be reliable in real-world applications.
>
> This summer, scientists began putting the devices to the test. In a  
> field trial in July, the Wasp Hound went nose-to-nose with a team  
> of five nationally certified human rescue dogs to detect soil  
> contaminated with the scent of human remains. The results will be  
> presented in February at a meeting of the American Academy of  
> Forensic Sciences.
>
>
> This fall, the bee bomb-detection device is being used in a blind  
> test by a small-town police force to sniff out explosives during a  
> training exercise, and will be done in concert with a canine team.
>
> Jeffery Tomberlin, an entomologist at Texas A&M University in  
> College Station, is working with Rains to carry out the field  
> trials with rescue dogs. He says using insects as biological  
> detectors offers several advantages over dogs. For example, insects  
> can be used to detect chemicals in situations such as arson, where  
> toxic fumes may pose a danger to the dog or its handler. Living- 
> insect sensors can also be put in the hands of someone who is not  
> trained to work with dogs.
>
> “Another advantage is that you don’t have to worry about the  
> wasp trying to provide a response simply because it wants to please  
> its owner,” he says. Still, not all scientists are convinced that  
> the insect sniffing devices will fly. University of Hawaii  
> biologist M.E. “Jeff” Bitterman, a pioneer in the field of  
> honeybee learning, says insects such as bees are constantly picking  
> up on new chemical cues in the environment. Even when trained to  
> only one scent, the bees will generalize and begin to respond to  
> other similar scents, he says.
>
> “In order to get a bee to respond only to the odor you’re  
> interested in, you have to do what’s called differential  
> reinforcement, which means you present some other odor without  
> sucrose until the animal responds differentially, and that may take  
> several trials,” Bitterman says.
>
> Moving to the real world presents other obstacles, Bitterman  
> notes. “It is one thing to assert that a forager from an  
> established hive can detect explosives in a dish under standard  
> field conditions but quite another to decide how to use that  
> ability in screening the contents of a shipping container at a pier  
> or on a highway.”
>
>
> Still, scientists working to build the insect devices say these  
> obstacles can be overcome. Wingo and his group reinforce their  
> bees’ learning every day with a “breakfast boost,” providing  
> the scent of interest with the bee’s morning meal.
>
> Despite the repeated training sessions, and the occasional sting,  
> Taylor-McCabe says the effort is worth it.
>
>
> “Bees are wonderful insects for detection devices,” she says.  
> “They give us an unambiguous answer, and they work until the  
> minute they die.”
>
>
> Susan Gaidos is a freelance science writer based in Cape Elizabeth,  
> Maine.
>
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> Suggested Reading:
>
> Milius, S. 2005. Face time: Bees can tell apart human portraits.  
> Science News 168(Dec. 3):360. Available at
> link.
> ______. 2004. Little brains that could: Bees show big-time working  
> memory. Science News 167(July 24):213. available at link.
> Cunningham, A. 2007. Lighting up for uranium. Science News 171 
> (March 3):141. Available at link.
> Explore more
> Glen Rains et al. “Using insect sniffing devices for detection.”  
> Trends in Biotechnology. June 2008.
> Citations & References:
>
> Tomberlin, J.K., G.C. Rains, and M.R. Sanford. 2008. Development of  
> Microplitis croceipes as a biological sensor. Entomologia  
> Experimentalis et Applicata 128(August)249-257. DOI: 10.1111/j. 
> 1570-7458.2008.00743.x
> Rains, G.C., J.K. Tomberlin, and D. Kulasiri. 2008. Using insect  
> sniffing devices for detection. Trends in Biotechnology 26(June): 
> 288-294.
> Rains, G.C., et al. 2004. Limits of volatile chemical detection of  
> a parasitoid wasp, Microplitis croceipes, and an electronic nose: A  
> comparative study. Transactions of the ASAE 47:2145-2152.
> Rains, G.C., et al. 2003. Parasitic wasps learn and report diverse  
> chemicals with unique conditionable behaviors. Chemical Senses 28 
> (July):545-549.
> Bitterman, M.E., et al. 1983. Classical conditioning of proboscis  
> extension in honeybees (Apis mellifera). Journal of Comparative  
> Psychology 97(June):107-119.
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