Bee off then

Another possible explanation of why beehives are vanishing.

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Honeybees are sensitive creatures. 

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Quite frequently nowadays hives simply give up the ghost and vanish.

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Colony collapse disorder, as this phenomenon is known, has been getting worse since 2006. 

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Most bee-keepers today worry that it may make their trade impossible, and will have a devastating  effect on agriculture—since many crops rely on bees to pollinate them. 

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Climate change, habitat destruction, pesticides and disease have all been suggested as possible causes. 

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Nothing, though, has been proved, although an answer seems to be coming closer. 

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But one of the latest ideas, reported in Naturwissenschaften  by Jeff Pettis of the Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, suggests that this may be because more than one factor is involved.

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Dr Pettis and his colleagues knew from previous reports that exposure to a pesticide called imidacloprid has a bad effect on honeybees’ ability to learn things and wondered whether it might be causing other, less noticeable, damage. 

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Since one thing common to colonies that go on to collapse seems to be a greater variety and higher load of parasites and pathogens than other colonies.

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They wondered in particular whether it might be weakening the insects’ immune systems, and thus allowing infections to spread through a hive.

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Both of the groups that had been exposed to imidacloprid harboured an average of 700,000 parasite spores in each bee. 

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Bees from the control colonies, by contrast, harboured fewer than 200,000 spores in their bodies. 

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The insecticide, in other words, was exposing bees to infestation, and thus to a much greater chance of dying prematurely.

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To find out, they gave 20 hives protein food (a substitute for pollen, which is fed to developing larvae) that had been spiked with imidacloprid. 

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In ten cases the dose was five parts per billion (ppb); in the other ten it was 20 ppb. 

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Previous experiments have shown that neither dose perceptibly harms bees. 

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A further ten hives were given unspiked food as a control. 

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Then, when the young bees emerged a few weeks later, Dr Pettis collected them and fed them with spores of a fungal parasite called Nosema. 

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Twelve days later, he killed them and estimated the extent of their infestation.

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Whether this is actually the reason for colonies collapsing remains to be determined. 

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But it is a plausible hypothesis, and is likely to get bee-keepers buzzing with interest.

Who's fleecing who?

The PR company Bell Pottinger’s offer to boost the reputation of Uzbekistan – by pulling a few tricks online – lays bare the shameless world of lobbying.

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Do you want to know the single biggest secret of lobbying? 

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It is that most of it is like taking candy from a child.

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We get very exercised by lobbying. 

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Shady conspiracies; the “dark arts”; secret access: all the phrases most redolent of corruption easily attach themselves to lobbyists – and sometimes, quite rightly. 

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The “cash for questions” scandal, in which Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, two Conservative MPs, were found to have been paid cash by a lobbyist, Ian Greer, to ask questions in Parliament on behalf of Mohamed Fayed was as straightforward an example of corruption as you could imagine.

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But however awful some of the exposés may be, the big secret of lobbying is that most of it is all mouth and no trousers – a big boast based on very little. 

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Many of the clients who hand over small fortunes to lobby companies are being royally fleeced, simply because the world of Whitehall and politics is so alien and seems far too daunting to be approached without the guiding hand of a lobbyist.
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Take the latest exposé, by the Orwellian-sounding Bureau of Investigative Journalism (in reality, an offshoot of the City University school of journalism). 
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Undercover journalists posed as representatives of the government of Uzbekistan, one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world. 
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Quite apart from the ethics of acting on behalf of such a government, what’s intriguing is the sheer brass neck of Bell Pottinger, the lobby company in question, for what it said it could do for the Uzbekistanis. 
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Bell Pottinger could, it claimed, manipulate search results on Google to “drown out” negative coverage of Uzbekistan’s human rights violations and child labour. 
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It has a team that “sorts” negative Wikipedia coverage of its clients. 
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And it could secure access to the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to David Cameron’s chief of staff Ed Llewellyn and to Mr Cameron’s closest adviser, Steve Hilton.

Report that straight and it reeks of corruption and sleaze. 
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But here’s what I mean by the big secret. Bell Pottinger is – like many lobby companies – pulling a fast one. 
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Take “drowning out” Google. 
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There’s no special trick here, available only to Bell Pottinger’s lucky clients. 
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It is simply doing what is known as Search Engine Optimisation. 
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Any newspaper with a website does it. 
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You want to make sure that your story is high up on Google’s search results, so you make sure it has key words that score well with Google’s web creepers.
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I’m about the world’s least technical person and even I know how to do it. 
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Bell Pottinger’s claim of some special ability to do this – to give other stories a higher profile on Google than those that damage its client – 
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Is a perfect example of the boastful nonsense on which so much lobbying is based.
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As for “sorting” negative entries on Wikipedia – hello? 
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The whole point of Wikipedia is that anyone – anyone! – can edit entries. 
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You can do it. 
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I can do it. 
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Nothing better illustrates the money-for-old-rope aspect of the trade than the notion that a lobby company might be hired by a foreign government to edit its Wikipedia entry. 
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You might just as well hire a computer-literate eight-year-old.
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Things get more nuanced when it comes to access. 
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When a lobby company boasts about its welcome in high places, it’s easy to see blatant corruption.
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And that can be true. 
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David Cameron said he would tackle lobbying when he was elected leader of the Conservative Party. 
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Last year he said it was “the next big scandal waiting to happen” that “has tainted our politics for too long, an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money”.
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He wanted, he said, to “shine the light of transparency” on lobbying so that politics “comes clean about who is buying power and influence”. 
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What could illustrate that more than Bell Pottinger’s claims about the access it could secure in return for a foreign government’s cash? 
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The idea that any client who is paying a lobbyist can gain access denied to others would strike almost anyone as wrong. 
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But it’s important to establish exactly what lobbyists claim to be able to do and what they charge for.
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You’re a widget manufacturer. You have a particular problem with a government decision that stops you competing with foreign manufacturers. 
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You don’t have a clue how Whitehall works and wouldn’t know where to start in trying to get decisions changed. 
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So you get in touch with a lobbying firm. 
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Let’s call it Boaste, Grabbit and Runne. 
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Its managing partner was at college with the minister, the firm tells you, and they speak all the time. 
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For a small fee – say £10,000 to sign on and a monthly £3,000 retainer – it will happily get in touch with the minister and set up a meeting.
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You come to London and meet the minister; he’s all ears. 
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He had no idea that the law was affecting your industry so badly.
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He promises to get something done. 
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You’re thrilled. 

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It was money well spent.
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Well, you’ve been had. 
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The lobbyist might well be a friend, but the minister would have been happy to see you anyway, friend or no friend. 
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Most ministers want nothing more than to be seen doing something practical for British industry. 
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If you’d written directly to him – or even just called up his office – and explained what your issue was, the chances are you could have had your meeting and got the same result.
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You might still think it was worth paying the lobbyist. 
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He has done the legwork and smoothed your path. 
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But is that corruption? 
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Or merely a highly paid form of secretarial work?
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That’s the problem. 
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The black and white cases – cash for questions – are easy. 
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But more often it’s shades of grey. 
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Because politics is all about talking. 
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It’s about meetings. 
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It’s about who knows who. 
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And to someone on the outside of those meetings, who doesn’t know anyone, it can indeed be a closed door.
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That is why lobby companies hire former ministers and MPs such as Tim Collins, now the managing director of Bell Pottinger Public Affairs. 
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They know people. 
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Mr Collins might be acting like a snake-oil salesman when he makes claims about Google and Wikipedia, but he was telling the truth when he claimed “I’ve been working with people like Steve Hilton, David Cameron, George Osborne for 20 years”. 
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As a Conservative Party staffer and MP, he has. 
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So yes, he knows them well.
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But think about one of his boasts, when he claimed that his influence on the Prime Minister led to an issue being raised with the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao during a state visit in June 2011. 
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“We were rung up at 2.30 on a Friday afternoon, by one of our clients, Dyson,” Mr Collins explained. 
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“He said, 'We’ve got a huge issue and that is that a lot of our products are being ripped off in China’ … 
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On the Saturday David Cameron raised it with the Chinese prime minister…
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He [Cameron] was doing it because we asked him to do it.”
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Really? 
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It’s likely that Mr Cameron was indeed made aware of the issue by Mr Collins. 
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But surely that’s exactly the sort of thing a British prime minister should raise in a bilateral meeting with the Chinese. 
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So again, it’s not black and white. Mr Dyson pays Bell Pottinger because he is a businessman, not a politician, and doesn’t know his way around Whitehall. 
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The company raised, on his behalf, a big issue for him – and also for the nation.
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We might not like the smell of such contacts, but it’s difficult to see what the real harm is. 
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That would arise if Bell Pottinger – or any other lobbyist – was able to procure favours for clients that go against the national interest, or to secure an advantage solely through having paid for a favour. 
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But we’ve not seen the evidence for that. 
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Yet.............................!

Stephen Pollard

An Afghan story

Before Afghanistan descended into civil war, a French geologist collected massive data on the country’s mining resources. 
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His findings, recently rediscovered, could unlock huge wealth in the troubled nation. 
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But look who’s already busy exploiting it.
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Afghanistan’s many troubles are compounded by the fact that it is the world’s largest producer of opium. 
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But it also has vast natural resources beyond its poppy fields, with the United States putting its mining potential at about one trillion dollars and others citing estimates of maybe even three times as much. 
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Cobalt, lithium, copper, oil, gold, rare earth – everything that the world needs to feed its factories is thought to be there.
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Yet detailed information about the specific locations of the deposits needed to guide explorations has long been lacking. 
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That, however, may be about to change with the identification of old French missionary maps of the Afghan territory that could unlock the country’s still-buried resources.
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The maps, yellowed by time, have been housed at the La Salle Institute in Beauvais, France, and contain extensive geological records of Afghanistan’s regions. 
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The information was compiled by French geological explorations between 1961 and 1978 led by a renowned geologist Albert de Lapparent, who was also a Catholic priest.
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“Abbot de Lapparent was the one who started the explorations,” recalls Christian Montenat, the former director of the Albert de Lapparent Geology Institute (IGAL), who spent eight summers in the Afghan mountains between 1971 and 1978.
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After being ordained a priest, and having already explored the Sahara, de Lapparent settled on the then little-known country of Afghanistan. 
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On his first trip, he discovered the Hajigak iron deposit in the mountains west of Kabul, an exceptional deposit of more than two billion tons. 
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The discovery opened the doors to Afghan authorities, who facilitated further French geological missions. 
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In1973, a permanent office was opened in Kabul. 
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The Soviet invasion in 1979 stopped everything, and the notebooks, samples, topographic and geological maps all ended up in the IGAL archives.
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A treasure trove of knowledge
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The friendship between a member of the Emergency Architects Foundation in Paris and a Franco-Afghan citizen resulted in the maps coming back to light. 
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The information gathered during the expeditions constitutes a treasure trove of geological knowledge.
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“Everything is still yet to be done in Afghanistan,” says Montenat. 
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The invading Russians continued working, and German, Italian and Spanish expeditions would later add to the knowledge base. 
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But Montenat says the information remains very general because the country’s political instability render impossible serious ground explorations, which are indispensable to refine data gathered by satellite.
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Professor Atiq Sediqi, director of the Afghan geological service, has launched a project to make the most of the rediscovered data. 
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“The maps of the French missions are going to be digitized to create a data base that aggregates knowledge available from other countries,” Sediqi says.
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Some preliminary technical discussions have also taken place at the French office for geological and mining research (BRGM). “
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The Afghans need support in creating a real service capable of conducting discussions with mining companies,” says Pierre Thierry, the BRGM’s director for Asia. 
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Much remains to be done in order for Afghanistan to fully benefit from its riches. 
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Professor Sediqi is well aware of the issues, including environmental concerns, that must be addressed with mining companies. 
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Perhaps the furthest ahead in exploiting the potential, not surprisingly, are the Chinese. 
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In 2007, the China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) obtained the concession to extract copper in Aynak, south of Kabul, which is probably the second largest deposit in the world. 
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To acquire the mining rights, MCC put more than $3 billion on the table to build the necessary infrastructure such as railroads and electrical power stations. 
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Worried about security and the lack of reliable data on which to base the costly process of prospecting, European companies – despite calls from the Afghan government – have so far been holding back.
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Gail Mangold-Vine  - Béatrice Pujebet

Where is it?

3 men go for dinner.
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Each buys a $10 steak. 
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At the end of the meal, they collect $30 between the three of them to cover the cost of the meal and give it to the waitress. 
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She goes back to the cash register, where the overlooking manager says. 
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"Those dinners are discounted, you need to give them $5 back." 
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So the waitress gets the five dollars, and returns to the table. 
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Not knowing how to split $5 between the three of them, she gives 1 dollar to each of the three patrons, and kept two for herself.
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Now if you do the maths.
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Together they paid $30.
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Received $3 back meaning they only paid $27. 
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The waitress kept $2. 
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This totals $29. 
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Where did the last dollar go?

Here comes Li-Fi

Among the many new gadgets unveiled at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a pair of smartphones able to exchange data using light. 
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These phones, as yet only prototypes from Casio, a Japanese firm, transmit digital signals by varying the intensity of the light given off from their screens. 
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The flickering is so slight that it is imperceptible to the human eye, but the camera on another phone can detect it at a distance of up to ten metres. 
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In an age of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, flashing lights might seem like going back to sending messages with an Aldis lamp. 
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In fact, they are the beginning of a fast and cheap wireless-communication system that some have labelled Li-Fi.
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The data being exchanged by Casio’s phones were trifles: message balloons to be added to pictures on social-networking sites. 
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But the firm sees bigger applications, such as pointing a smartphone at an illuminated shop sign to read information being transmitted by the light: opening times, for example, or the latest bargain
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Yet that is still only a flicker of what is possible. 
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Last October a number of companies and industry groups formed the Li-Fi Consortium, to promote high-speed optical wireless systems. 
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The idea is that light can help with a looming capacity problem. 
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As radio-based wireless becomes ubiquitous, more and more devices transmitting more and more data are able to connect to the internet, either through the mobile-phone network or through Wi-Fi. 
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But there is only a limited amount of radio spectrum available. 
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Using light offers the possibility of breaking out of this conundrum by exploiting a completely different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, one that is already ubiquitous because it is used for another purpose: illumination.
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Lighten the darkness
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To turn a light into a Li-Fi router involves modulating its output, to carry a message, and linking it with a network cable to a modem that is connected to a telephone or cable-broadband service, just like a Wi-Fi router. 
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Incandescent light bulbs and fluorescent tubes are not really suitable for modulation, but they are yesterday’s lighting technology. 
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Tomorrow’s is the light-emitting diode. 
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LEDs are rapidly replacing bulbs and tubes because they are more efficient. 
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And because they are semiconductor devices, tinkering with their electronics to produce the flickering signals required for data transmission is pretty straightforward, according to Gordon Povey, who is working on light communication with Harald Haas and his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, in Britain.
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The rate of data transfer is also good. 
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Dr Povey’s group is already up to 130 megabits a second (faster than some older Wi-Fi routers) over a distance of about two metres, using standard LEDs. 
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Dr Povey, who is also the boss of VLC, a firm set up to commercialise the technology, thinks such devices should be able to reach 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), and do so over greater range. 
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Specially constructed LEDs would be even faster. 
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The Li-Fi consortium reckons more than 10 Gbps is possible. In theory, that would allow a high-definition film to be downloaded in 30 seconds.
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Dr Povey believes that adapting existing LEDs to work with the sensors and light sources—cameras, ambient-light detectors, screens, flashbulbs, torches and so on—already found in smartphones and similar devices will be the fastest way to bring Li-Fi to market. 
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VLC has already produced a smartphone app which allows low-speed data transmission between a pair of iPhones. 
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It has also made an experimental optical transceiver that plugs into a laptop to receive and send light signals. 
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Later this year it will bring out Li-Fi products for firms installing LED-lighting systems.
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There are limitations to using light, of course. 
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Unlike radio, light waves will not penetrate walls. 
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Yet for secure applications that could be a bonus. 
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And light bulbs—some 14 billion of them around the world—are almost everywhere and often on. 
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As they are gradually replaced by LEDs, every home, office, public building and even streetlight could become a Li-Fi hotspot. 
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Having a line-of-sight connection with the LED in question would undoubtedly improve the signal, but light reflected from walls or ceilings might often be enough.
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In any case, having a good line of sight helps Wi-Fi as well. 
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And spotting a nearby light in order to sit next to it is certainly easier than finding the location of a Wi-Fi router.
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Communication, though, is a two-way street. 
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That means the LEDs involved in Li-Fi would need photo detectors to receive data. 
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Some LED systems have such sensors already (to know when to turn on at night). 
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But even if LEDs are not modified Dr Povey reckons hybrid systems are possible: data could be downloaded using light but uploaded (typically a less data-intensive process) using radio. 
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In an office, for example, an LED-powered desk lamp could work as a Li-Fi router, able to link up with any networked device placed on the desk.
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A big advantage of light is that it can be used in areas which contain sensitive equipment that radio signals might interfere with, such as aircraft and operating theatres. 
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LEDs in the ceiling of an airliner would not only allow internet access but could also transmit films on demand to individual seats, removing the need for lots of expensive and heavy cabling, thus saving airlines fuel. 
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That alone could be enough to, as it were, make this idea fly.
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Economist - Science and technology