Plus: Honey Bee Mysteries, Noisy Meals, Punching Robots and Slow-Motion Water Droplets.

Honey Bee Mystery Solved?
Starting in 2006, honeybees began to die out in enormous quantities and without any clear explanation, posing a serious threat to the global ecosystem — not to mention the honey supply. Although the epidemic continues today, scientists may have uncovered the main source of the mysterious bee deaths.

Known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the devastating loss of up to 40 percent of the United States’ honeybee population was perhaps best documented in a 2007 piece from the New Yorker, which highlighted the lack of clear answers: “All sorts of theories were soon proposed. The mysterious ailment was a new disease, or it was a response to drought, or to stress, or to toxins. According to one widely reported hypothesis, cell-phone transmissions were disrupting the bees’ navigational abilities.”

The seemingly true answer involves an unusual combination of factors. A partnership between military scientists and entomologists recently traced the cause to an interaction between a virus and a fungus that created a deadly biological agent. The team’s findings, published in the science journal PLoS One, “implicate co-infection by IIV and Nosema with honey bee colony decline, giving credence to older research pointing to IIV, interacting with Nosema and mites, as probable cause of bee losses in the U.S.A., Europe and Asia.”

The virus and the fungus target bees’ abdomens, and scientists found the presence of both in every collapsed colony they studied. “While the exact causal relationship is unknown, an initial infection of one could stress a bee’s system, making it vulnerable to the subsequent follow-up punch,” Discovery News explains.

Although many questions remain unanswered, including why the bees have been flying off to die alone, the researchers claim the results may enable them to begin fighting the epidemic. “They said that combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus — controllable with antifungal agents — especially when the virus is detected,” the New York Times explains.

Google Develops Self-Driving Car
The pleasure of driving can often be undermined by traffic jams, confusing routes or poor drivers. However, a new autonomous driving technology that relies on vehicular artificial intelligence may help alleviate these problems.

Developed by a team of engineers at Google, the as-yet-unnamed automated vehicle relies on video cameras, radar sensors, a laser range finder, detailed maps and massive data-processing centers to steer the car. Along with safety experts and software operators, prototypes of the autonomous car have already driven themselves 140,000 miles throughout California.

“[O]ne of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use,” Google explains. “So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves.”

While letting cars operate themselves may sound dangerous, Google argues that robotic drivers react faster than humans and cannot become distracted, sleepy or intoxicated. Moreover, the new technology may improve traffic and fuel efficiency in the future.

“The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption,” the Times reports. “But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today’s personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected.”

Water Dropping on Superhydrophobic Nanotubes
You’ve probably seen slow-motion video of splashing water droplets, but when was the last time you saw a droplet bounce off a superhydrophobic carbon nanotube array? These massive water-repelling molecules are used in a variety of nanotechnology applications, and the images of water interacting with them can be surprisingly beautiful.

Here’s a video showing what happened in a study by California Institute of Technology graduate student Adrianus Aria, available on Cornell University’s arXiv.org:

Punching Robots Aim to Make the World Safer
A robotics lab in Slovenia is currently conducting experiments to test one of the most revered principles of science fiction: Isaac Asimov’s First Rule of Robotics, which states that “a robot may not injure a human being.”

Of course, to test the rule, they have to break it.

The researchers have programmed a small production-line robot, normally used for assembling machines, to strike a human volunteer’s forearm at 18 different impact levels while the robot arm is equipped with a blunt or round tool. The volunteers are then asked to judge the level of pain inflicted by each impact.

“Even robots designed to Asimov’s laws can collide with people. We are trying to make sure that when they do, the collision is not too powerful,” Borut Povše, the head of the project, told New Scientist. “We are taking the first steps to defining the limits of the speed and acceleration of robots, and the ideal size and shape of the tools they use, so they can safely interact with humans.”

By modeling robot-human collision effects, the researchers hope to clarify the boundary between safe versus injurious encounters, and thus create programmable parameters that will prevent a robot from harming a human operator or observer.

Does Your Meal Taste Bad? It Might Be the Noise
Ever wonder why airplane food tastes so bad? New research shows that it may not be the quality of the food or the cooking, but the atmosphere in which you’re eating. In other words, noise can make your meal taste bad.

According to British researchers, background noise can greatly affect the intensity of a food’s flavor and its crunchiness, which helps explain why meals eaten in extremely noisy settings — including space shuttle missions — taste worse than their ingredients or preparation methods would suggest.

The team’s findings, published this month in the journal Food Quality and Preference, indicate that “food properties unrelated to sound (sweetness, saltiness) and those conveyed via auditory channels (crunchiness) are differentially affected by background noise.” Specifically, “background sound unrelated to food diminishes gustatory food properties (saltiness, sweetness) which is suggestive of a cross-modal contrasting or attentional effect, whilst enhancing food crunchiness.”

“NASA gives their space explorers very strong-tasting foods, because for some reason they can’t taste food that strongly — again, perhaps it’s the background noise,” Andy Woods, a scientist at Unilever laboratories and one of the authors of the study, told BBC News. “The evidence points to this effect being down to where your attention lies — if the background noise is loud it might draw your attention to that, away from the food.”

For the experiment, participants wore blindfolds while listening to silence or white noise through headphones, and rated various kinds of sweet and salty foods. The findings suggest that diners’ overall satisfaction with their food often depends on how much they like what they’re hearing. So the next time you’d like to savor your airline meal, be sure to bring some soothing music, or at least earplugs.

Have a great weekend, folks.