The life of the fly that infects zombie bees is reminiscent of the movie “Alien,” the newspaper reported. A small adult female lands on the back of a honeybee and injects eggs into the bee’s abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots. “They basically eat the insides out of the bee,” Hafernik said. After consuming their host, the maggots pupate, forming a hard outer shell that looks like a fat, brown grain of rice. That’s what Hohn found in the plastic bag with the dead bees. Adult flies emerge in three to four weeks. no evidence yet that the parasitic fly is a major player in the bees’ decline, but it does seem the pest is targeting new hosts, said Steve Sheppard, chairman of the entomology department at Washington State University. “It may occur a lot more widely than we think,” he said. That’s what Hafernik hopes to find out with his website, . The site offers simple instructions for collecting suspect bees, watching for signs of parasites and reporting the results. Once more people start looking, the number of sightings will probably climb, Hohn said. “I’m pretty confident I’m not the only one in Washington state who has them,” he said. Did life on other planets originate from Earth? George Dvorsky In the opening scene of Ridley Scott's Prometheus, an alien Engineer is seen seeding the Earth with life — an interesting suggestion as to how life emerged on this planet. It would now appear, however, that the film got this backwards: A newly discovered gravitational process called "weak transfer" indicates that the Earth was once capable of sending microbe-carrying rocks out of the solar system. As a result, astrobiologists are now wondering if our planet has spawned life elsewhere. Escape velocity Proponents of the have spent most of their time trying to understand how an incoming object may have given rise to life on Earth. The basic idea is that a microbe-laden meteorite landed here billions of years ago, resulting in a kind of extraterrestrial genesis. A fundamental problem with this theory, however, is how such a meteorite could make the journey from a neighboring solar system. According to the lithopanspermia theory, microorganisms may have been ejected into space after a planet suffered a cataclysmic impact with an asteroid, or by virtue of a powerful volcanic eruption. Most scientists don't contest this
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has conceived of how to make one a reality. "The idea of creating a crystal with dimensions higher than that of conventional 3D crystals is an important conceptual , and it is very exciting for us to be the first to devise a way to realize a space-time crystal," Berkeley Lab physicist Tongcang Li, a member of the research group, said in a statement. [] Zhang and his colleagues suggest that a space-time crystal could be constructed using an electric field to trap charged atoms (called ions), and taking advantage of the natural repulsion between two like-charged particles (positive and positive, or negative and negative), which is called Coulomb repulsion. "The electric of the ion trap holds charged particles in place and Coulomb repulsion causes them to spontaneously form a spatial ring crystal," Zhang said. "Under the application of a weak static magnetic field, this ring-shaped ion crystal will begin a rotation that will never stop. The persistent rotation of trapped ions produces temporal order, leading to the formation of a crystal at the lowest quantum energy state." In other words, the scientists would aim to create a ring of charged particles, with the resulting electromagnetic forces causing the structure to rotate perpetually. At its lowest quantum-energy state, also known as its ground state, the system has no disorder, or entropy, and there is no way for its entropy to increase over time. Thus, the crystal's temporal structure and timekeeping ability would continue even after the universe reached a state of "," also known as thermodynamic equilibrium, when it had devolved into entropy I am very pleased by their finding because it is fully in line with the hypothesis that Nobel laureate Francis Crick and I advanced in 1995. Writing in Nature, we had argued that neurons in V1 do not directly contribute to visual consciousness. Our speculation was based on the absence of a direct connection between cells in V1 and their partners in the frontal lobe in macaques. The fMRI experiment described here provided evidence for our conjecture. Whether or not our connectional argument is valid remains open, of course. It appears that the habitat of consciousness is not the cortical region at the bottom of the extended hierarchy of cortical areas dedicated to vision. Consciousness is restricted to higher