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Worker bees rebel when faced with the prospect of raising their nephews and nieces, research has found.

Prof Michal Woyciechowski from the Institute of Environmental Sciences at Jagiellonian University in Poland led the research.

For both experiments the researchers found that, before a new queen developed, the worker larvae actually grew ovaries – forming egg-producing tubes in place of the food-producing glands they use to "nurse" the colonial brood.

"Most investigators of honey bees strongly believe that the number of [egg-producing tubes] in workers' ovaries is determined genetically," said Prof Woyciechowski.

"This is of course true, however, none of them expected that, during workers' development, larvae have a possibility to switch from nursing to rebel strategy."

But the observed rebellion was brief: once the new queen's own workers hatched they were able to suppress the reproducing rebels.

Prof Woyciechowski suggested that, among animals well-known for their altruism, the motivation for the workers development is surprisingly "selfish".

"Rebel strategy – direct reproduction and an increase in personal fitness – probably gives the workers a better chance to multiply their genes than indirect reproduction via [the] sister-queen," he said.

Meerkats will stick paws and noses into many a crevice in search of their favourite food – scorpions.

Dr Alex Thornton, an animal behaviour specialist from the University of Cambridge, led the study.

He and his team set "tasks" for a group of wild meerkats in the southern Kalahari Desert. The researchers left out closed transparent containers with opaque lids that the animals had to work out how to open in order to reach a scorpion inside.

The researchers explained in their paper that they wanted to know "what drives individuals to innovate, and what psychological mechanisms allow them to do so".

Dr Thornton said that with meerkats, "it seems it's more about persistence than intelligence".

"They don't seem to work out the rule – to attack the opaque part of the different apparatus," he explained.

"When you give them a new task, they go back to square one.

"They tend to just keep scratching away fruitlessly at the transparent sides [of the container] rather than going straight for the opaque part that will give them the reward."

Despite this apparent lack of ingenuity, the low-ranked males outperformed all other members of the group. They simply would not give up until they had worked out how reach the scorpion.

Dr Thornton explained that these subordinate adult males were the ones that left their group to find mates, "so it's beneficial for them to be willing to take risks and try to solve new problems when they encounter them", he said.

The researcher added that, although many researchers have suggested that innovation may be "cognitively demanding", these results indicated that "simple, conserved learning processes and dogged perseverance may suffice to generate solutions to novel problems".

"I think the phrase that best describes this is 'necessity is the mother of invention,'" said Dr Thornton. "If you're dominant, you can bully and steal stuff from others.

"If you're subordinate, it may pay for you to take risks and figure things out for yourself."

Two US rocket companies are readying the first private space missions to the International Space Station (ISS).

Orbital Sciences Corporation is still to test fire its Antares rocket, and its Cygnus capsule has yet to make it to space.

While SpaceX will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, Orbital has chosen the lesser-known Wallops Island, a Nasa-operated facility just four hours drive from Washington DC.

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, or MARS, to give the launch site its proper name, is still a building site as final work is completed to ready the site for a static test firing of the Antares rocket.

The rockets themselves lie on their sides in a massive hangar just over a mile away from where they will be transported to the pad aboard an equally massive "erector launch vehicle" which will lift them into position on the surface of MARS.

Antares' launch and flight into space will be controlled from a nearby Nasa control room. There, amid the screens and consoles, Jay Pittmann, Nasa's range commander at Wallops, says the agency is learning the art of letting go.

"It is a risk to hand that off to a commercial entity and to give up control. That is the biggest difficulty for us, not being in every part of that, assuring that every piece is going to work.

"In the end, we're taking our lifeline and we're handing it to these commercial companies, but we have confidence that they're going to get there."

There is also an eagerness to have access to American rockets, even if they're not Nasa's.

"We're relying on the Russians and other nations to get equipment and material to the International Space Station," he says. "Quite honestly, that's not as comfortable a position as we'd like to be in as a nation."

It's not just the agency which is conscious of the risks involved. Orbital will have the task of guiding the Cygnus capsule to the ISS from the company's control facilities at its Dulles HQ, near Washington, and the design of the entire rocket system is its responsibility.

Frank Culbertson says things could go wrong.

"Nasa has to bless us, and Nasa has full veto power when we get within the vicinity of the station, but the companies are responsible for their performance," he says.

"Since it's a fixed-price contract, we also have to control our costs, control our resources, and if we're ever going to make any money on it, we've really got to do it efficiently.

"That means in reality there may be some failures. If that's the case, we just learn from them and we go on and we get the next one going."

What all parties are hoping is that Orbital and SpaceX can not only get to the station safely, but that they can lead the way in cutting the cost of space travel.

"What I'd like to see is that the competition between the two firms spurs some technical breakthroughs that result in lower cost for getting to space," says Prof Howard McCurdy of the American University in Washington DC.

"It just costs too much right now. You wouldn't want to drink water in space if you knew what it cost to put it there."

Hollywood director James Cameron is still awaiting a clear stretch of weather to begin his dive to the deepest place in the ocean.

At this time of year, strong winds blow in across the Pacific, making the sea state unpredictable.

Mr Cameron and his team are waiting on the sub's mothership near the trench until the weather improves.

They need calmer seas to safely launch the sub into the water, but as soon as this happens they are determined to make the dive.

Until now, there has only ever been one manned expedition to deepest ocean, which took place in 1960.

US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard made the 11km journey in a vessel called the Bathyscaphe Trieste.

Mr Cameron's sub, called the Deepsea Challenger, has been built in Australia by a team of engineers, many of whom have worked on his films.

Search for new life

The vessel is bright green, and is kitted out with lights and cameras so that he can film the deepest ocean.

A science team is also working alongside Mr Cameron so that they can identify any new species that he spots, and study samples of soil and rocks that he intends to return to the surface.

Mr Cameron completed an 8.2km (5.1 mile) dive to the New Britain Trench, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, at the beginning of March.

He told BBC News that he thinks that one of the jellyfish he caught on camera could be a new species.

He said that the dive to the Mariana trench would not a one off, and that he wanted to open up the oceans for exploration.

Thousands of possible early human settlements have been discovered by archaeologists using computers to scour satellite images.

Jason Ur said he had found about 9,000 potential new sites in north-eastern Syria.

Computers scanned the images for soil discolouration and mounds caused when mud-brick settlements collapsed.

Dr Ur said surveying the same area on the ground would have taken him a lifetime.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researcher told BBC News: "With these computer science techniques, however, we can immediately come up with an enormous map which is methodologically very interesting, but which also shows the staggering amount of human occupation over the last 7,000 or 8,000 years.

"What's more, anyone who comes back to this area for any future survey would already know where to go.

"There's no need to do this sort of initial reconnaissance to find sites. This allows you to do targeted work, so it maximises the time we have on the ground."

In the past, Dr Ur used declassified spy satellite photographs and the human eye to try to identify potential sites.

But over the last three years, he has worked with computer expert Bjoern Menze, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to create a software application able to classify a huge range of terrain.

He said this had removed subjectivity and allowed them to look at a much larger area.

In all, about 9,000 possible settlements were identified across 23,000 sq km.

Ideally, he said, some of these would be excavated, but the volatile political situation in Syria had forced them to put any ground searches on hold.

However, he did tell the BBC that he hoped to conduct further research in the Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq, and follow that up with excavations that would be "a very rigorous testing of the model".

Archaeological work in Iraq has not been popular in the past, but Dr Ur feels the time is right to identify heritage sites of importance and ensure they are not lost as the country presses on with widespread development of its towns and cities.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Scientists said they have gotten even closer to proving the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that supplies mass to matter and would complete Albert Einstein’s theory of the universe.

Analyzing data from some 500 trillion sub-atomic particle collisions designed to emulate conditions right after the Big Bang when the universe was formed, scientists at Fermilab outside Chicago produced some 1,000 Higgs particles over a decade of work.

“Unfortunately, this hint is not significant enough to conclude that the Higgs boson exists,” said Rob Roser, a physicist at Fermilab, near Chicago, in explaining the findings being presented on Wednesday at a conference in La Thuille, Italy.

The image scientists have of the short-lived Higgs particles, which almost immediately decay into other particles, is still slightly “fuzzy,” Roser said.

The probability that what physicists detected is not a Higgs boson and is instead a statistical fluke was 1 in 250, which is near the threshold of 1 in 740 that physics has set to establish proof of a sub-atomic particle’s existence.

The hunt for the Higgs boson is significant because it would show the existence of an invisible field thought to permeate the entire universe. The Higgs field was posited in the 1960s by British scientist Peter Higgs as the way that matter obtained mass after the universe was created during the Big Bang.

According to the theory, it was the agent that made the stars, planets and life possible by giving mass to most elementary particles. Some gave it the nickname the “God particle.”

Discovery of the Higgs would also complete Einstein’s Standard Model of Physics. If it does not exist, scientists would have to search elsewhere for how particles gained mass and why they are not merely shooting aimlessly through the universe.

The weight of Higgs particles found at Fermilab was consistent with those detected at the more powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, at the CERN research center near Geneva, Switzerland.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is hot on the trail of the Higgs boson and hopes to gain proof of the particle before its accelerator temporarily shuts down at the end of 2012 for an upgrade.

Before Fermilab’s four-mile (6.3-km) -long Tevatron was closed for good in September 2011 and the particle accelerator baton handed to CERN, scientists pushed the collider to produce as many sub-atomic collisions as possible.

The two circular accelerators operate differently, Roser said. Fermilab’s accelerator fired protons at antiprotons, while CERN’s 16.7-mile (27-km) -long accelerator creates collisions between two beams of protons.

An analogy posed by physicist Gregorio Bernardi in a statement released by Fermilab was of two people taking a picture of a child in a park from different vantage points.

“One picture may show a child that is blocked from the other’s view by a tree. Both pictures may show the child but only one can resolve the child’s features. You need to combine both viewpoints to get a true picture of who is in the park,” he said.

Physicists from around the world are at work at both laboratories, with hundreds still laboring at Fermilab analyzing the data from its experiments.

“We’ve used up most of our data” at Fermilab, Roser said. “We’ll do a few more experiments and try to have a final answer in June.”

(Editing by Bill Trott)

Marine biologists are starting to get a good idea now of how squid hear and how they react to sounds in the ocean.

It is only recently that scientists have come to accept that cephalopods have any auditory capability at all.

But new experiments show noises of varying loudness and frequency will elicit a range of behaviours in the animals – such as jetting or inking, and even a change of colour.

The research has been featured at the biennial Ocean Sciences Meeting.

It was presented by Aran Mooney from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) of Massachusetts, US.

He is interested in squid because they represent something of a keystone species in the ocean, sitting right at the heart of many food webs. If they are not the predator in those webs, they will almost certainly be the prey.

And that makes it important to know whether anything we may be doing in the oceans could be unsettling them.

"We produce a lot of noise through exploration of the oceans, scientific research, oil drilling, gas exploration and commercial shipping," Dr Mooney tells BBC News.

"A lot of that is low-frequency noise, which is what squid detect. And if we're influencing these animals then presumably we could change their behaviour."

Previous work at WHOI's Sensory Physiology and Sensory Ecology Lab had established that squid could hear sounds in the range of 50Hz to 500Hz; but they are best below 300Hz. It is the same sort of range as fish.

The squid use two closely spaced organs called statocysts to sense sound.

"I think of a statocyst as an inside-out tennis ball," explains Dr Mooney.

"It's got hairs on the inside and this little dense calcium stone that sits on those hair cells.

"What happens is that the sound wave actually moves the squid back and forth, and this dense object stays relatively still. It bends the hair cells and generates a nerve response to the brain."

The latest research has attempted to gauge exactly what sound means to the squid, and how they might use it.

In a tank in his lab, Dr Mooney plays noises of varying loudness and frequency to the animals, and watches for their response. He has been able to map how the different levels of sound will prompt the cephalopods into different behaviours.

"They react in about 10 milliseconds," he says. "That's really fast; it's essentially a reflex. That's really important in terms of behavioural responses because they're not thinking about processing it; they're not deciding whether they should react – they're just doing it.

And he adds: "The responses can be really dynamic. They can be a change in colour; they can be jetting (moving quickly) or inking responses. Squid are also very cool because you can look at a range of colour changes – is it a really startling colour change or a more subtle change?

"Squid can probably use their hearing to find their way around the environment – to sense the soundscape of the environment; for example, to find their way towards a reef or away from a reef, towards the surface or away from the surface."

The research to date has concentrated on the longfin species (Loligo pealei), an important fishery species on the east coast of the US.

But Dr Mooney plans to extend his studies to other cephalopods, such as another Loligo species on the West Coast and the Humboldt squid, which represent the largest invertebrate fishery in the world. Already in the lab, work has started on cuttlefish.

"They will ink more and jet more," says Dr Mooney.

"We're finding subtle differences between the species that I wouldn't necessarily have expected. You just don't know until you try it. Go to octopuses and you may get a different response again; and the same is true with the really big squid."

Getting a giant squid into the WHOI tank might prove problematic. These creatures are rarely sighted, let along caught; and certainly not alive.

But ongoing research is trying to establish more details about the functioning of squid statocysts, and from that information it may be possible to make some useful predictions about the auditory talents of the oceans' largest cephalopods.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter

The public are going to get the chance to see live creatures pulled up from the deep ocean in a permanent display.

Normally when organisms are raised from kilometres below the sea surface, they quickly die because of the huge change in pressure.

But scientists have now developed the Abyss Box, which can maintain animals in the extreme environment they need.

The vessel, containing deep-sea crab and shrimp, will go on show at the Oceanopolis aquarium in Brest, France.

The volume of the box is quite small (16 litres) but researchers believe the technology could eventually be scaled up to house larger animals, such as fish.

It is hoped such vessels will enable scientists to study bottom-dwelling creatures over long periods of time – something that is just not possible at the moment.

"We want such basic information as the length of life of a deep-sea animal," explained Dr Bruce Shillito, a marine biologist at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.

"No-one really knows how long they live, so by keeping them this way we can get that information. Of course, its information in captivity but it's better than no information at all," he told BBC News.

Dr Shillito has been discussing the project here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

He famously retrieved a live fish from a record depth of 2,300m at the hot vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

On that occasion, he used his Periscop vessel, which kept the animal under pressure as it made its journey to the surface.

But the Abyss Box goes a stage further because it is equipped to sustain and nourish its residents over the long term. This means changing its water regularly, and introducing food while still maintaining a pressure of 18 megapascal (180 bar) – equivalent to a depth of about 1,800m.

Something edible – probably blue mussel – will be put through an exchange chamber. "It's like the astronauts moving in and out of the space station," said Dr Shillito.

Indeed, the pressure inside the box means the public will have quite a restricted view of the shrimp and crab. The window – there is only one – is a porthole 10cm thick and 15cm wide. And the volume inside is just 16 litres. Even so, all the equipment required to maintain the extreme environment means the Abyss Box weighs 600kg.

Scientists will use this kind of technology to understand how organisms survive at depth and what their lifecycles are like.

There is an acknowledgement that warmer seas are forcing some creatures to go deeper to stay in the coolers waters they prefer.

Not every marine organism has this ability to migrate downwards, however, and equipment like the Abyss Box will be used to run experiments to establish which creatures are likely to make the move successfully.

"It is well established knowledge that climate warming is causing changes in the distribution or organisms at the global scale," said Dr Sven Thatje, a colleague of Dr Shillito's from the University of Southampton, UK.

"Many species inhabiting the oceans have already gone cooler by moving to higher latitudes where they have not been found before.

"We propose that moving to greater depths is an ignored response mechanism that allows species to escape undesirably warm surface waters. Changes in the depth distribution of species will lead to major changes in ocean ecosystems."

Oceanopolis is expected to put the Abyss Box on display in April.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter

Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year.

"The reason we are doing this is not to show a viable product but to show that in reality we can do this," he told BBC News.

"From then on, we need to spend a whole lot of work and money to make the process efficient and then cost effective."

So why use such high tech methods to produce meat when livestock production methods have done the job effectively for thousands of years?

It is because most food scientists believe that current methods of food production are unsustainable.

Some estimate that food production will have to double within the next 50 years to meet the requirements of a growing population. During this period, climate change, water shortages and greater urbanisation will make it more difficult to produce food.

Prof Sean Smukler from the University of British Columbia said keeping pace with demand for meat from Asia and Africa will be particularly hard as demand from these regions will shoot up as living standards rise. He thinks that lab grown meat could be a good solution.

"It will help reduce land pressures," he told BBC News. "Anything that stops more wild land being converted to agricultural land is a good thing. We're already reaching a critical point in availability of arable land," he said.

Lab-grown meat could eventually become more efficient than producing meat the old fashioned way, according to Prof Post. Currently, 100g of vegetable protein has to be fed to pigs or cows to produce 15g of animal protein, an efficiency of 15%. He believes that synthetic meat could be produced with an equivalent energy efficiency of 50%.

So what is the synthetic burger likely to taste like?

"In the beginning it will taste bland," says Prof Post ref. "I think we will need to work on the flavour separately by trying to figure out which components of the meat actually produce the taste and analyse what the composition of the strip is and whether we can change that."

Prof Post also said that if the technology took off, it would reduce the number of animals that were factory farmed and slaughtered.

But David Steele, who is president of Earthsave Canada, said that the same benefits could be achieved if people ate less meat.

"While I do think that there are definite environmental and animal welfare advantages of this high-tech approach over factory farming, especially, it is pretty clear to me that plant-based alternatives… have substantial environmental and probably animal welfare advantages over synthetic meat," he said.

Dr Steele, who is also a molecular biologist, said he was also concerned that unhealthily high levels of antibiotics and antifungal chemicals would be needed to stop the synthetic meat from rotting.

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