[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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