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Comment Honeybee warfare (Score 1) 697

by xC0000005 (#42641209) Attached to: Scientist Seeks 'Adventurous Human Woman' For Neanderthal Baby
is restricted to the entrance to the hive, by and large, I should point out. In the case of supersedure, the workers most often shun the failing queen, starving her. She'll be dragged out of the hive dead by the workers if she continues to lay drones while her QMP falls.

In the case of swarm queens, you'll note that the workers control who gets to fight and who doesn't.

The workers control which swarm cells get destroyed and which don't.

The workers affect emergence in severely crowded brood conditions, allowing afterswarms (which are a bet with a small cost and a big payout, and a queen elimination strategy). Among peer queens, those of similar lineage submit, older allowing themselves to be killed (look up the normal queen bee fighting research). If the genetic lines differ, the war is on.

Sick bees are not killed - when they fall to the floor they are dragged out, same as the dead bees. Sure would make things easier if they were. Old bees are not killed - they serve as the outer layer of the cluster, with abdomen temperatures at ambient, burning out their last supplies to keep the cluster warm.

The colony, in effect, operates as a single creature, whose cells happen to be capable of independence, but never doubt that it is the workers in control, and the most bitter battles are those fought to defend the entrance to the hive, because it is the gateway to the brood and the food.

Comment Re:Beekeepers! (Score 3, Interesting) 252

by xC0000005 (#38002796) Attached to: Gadget Allows You to Keep Bees In Your Apartment
I just do it for fun. I enjoy working the bees and learning about them. I enjoy writing about working with them (though over time my writing changed from describing "mystical forces" to being backed by research papers and studies). I woke up one day as an adult and realized that hey, there was nothing keeping me from getting some bees except me. So I found a local association, read a book, and got some equipment. And did I mention there's honey involved?
Programming

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.
Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."
The Almighty Buck

America's Army Games Cost $33 Million Over 10 Years 192

Posted by Soulskill from the your-tax-dollars-at-play dept.
Responding to a Freedom Of Information Act request, the US government has revealed the operating costs of the America's Army game series over the past decade. The total bill comes to $32.8 million, with yearly costs varying from $1.3 million to $5.6 million. "While operating America's Army 3 does involve ongoing expenses, paying the game's original development team isn't one of them. Days after the game launched in June, representatives with the Army confirmed that ties were severed with the Emeryville, California-based team behind the project, and future development efforts were being consolidated at the America's Army program office at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. A decade after its initial foray into the world of gaming, the Army doesn't appear to be withdrawing from the industry anytime soon. In denying other aspects of the FOIA request, the Army stated 'disclosure of this information is likely to cause substantial harm to the Department of the Army's competitive position in the gaming industry.'"
Australia

New Aliens Vs. Predator Game Doesn't Make It Past AU Ratings Board 277

Posted by Soulskill from the gauntlet-thrown dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Australia refused to give Rebellion's new Aliens Vs. Predator game a rating, effectively banning it in the country. Rebellion says it won't be submitting an edited version for another round of classifications, however. (As Valve did with Left 4 Dead 2.) They said, 'We will not be releasing a sanitized or cut down version for territories where adults are not considered by their governments to be able to make their own entertainment choices.'"
Image

Jetman Attempts Intercontinental Flight 140

Posted by samzenpus from the a-jetwing-and-a-prayer dept.
Last year we ran the story of Yves Rossy and his DIY jetwings. Yves spent $190,000 and countless hours building a set of jet-powered wings which he used to cross the English Channel. Rossy's next goal is to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, from Tangier in Morocco and Tarifa on the southwestern tip of Spain. From the article: "Using a four-cylinder jet pack and carbon fibre wings spanning over 8ft, he will jump out of a plane at 6,500 ft and cruise at 130 mph until he reaches the Spanish coast, when he will parachute to earth." Update 18:57 GMT: mytrip writes: "Yves Rossy took off from Tangiers but five minutes into an expected 15-minute flight he was obliged to ditch into the wind-swept waters."
Transportation

Gigantic Air Gun To Blast Cargo Into Orbit 384

Posted by timothy from the phwipt-phwipt dept.
Hugh Pickens writes: "The New Scientist reports that with a hat tip to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon , physicist John Hunter has outlined the design of a gigantic gun that could slash the cost of putting cargo into orbit. At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described the design for a 1.1-kilometer-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometers per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit. The gun would cost $500 million to build, says Hunter, but individual launch costs would be lower than current methods. 'We think it's at least a factor of 10 cheaper than anything else,' Hunter says. The gun is based on the SHARP (Super High Altitude Research Project) light gas gun Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 meters long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometers per second."
Programming

Ted Dziuba Says, "I Don't Code In My Free Time" 619

Posted by timothy from the your-allotment-of-seconds-on-earth dept.
theodp writes "When he gets some free time away from his gigs at startup Milo and The Register, you won't catch Ted Dziuba doing any recreational programming. And he wouldn't want to work for a company that doesn't hire those who don't code in their spare time. 'You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems?' asks Dziuba. 'F***, ANYTHING.'"

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