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Weird Science is training bees and packing viruses

// February 7th, 2010 // Tech News

To bees, human faces are just another flower: It turns out that if you consistently associate a picture of a human face with some sugar water, bees can actually be trained to identify specific faces. But, it turns out that bees are able to figure out faces because they recognize specific configurations of features ; you can train them just as effectively on a smiley face. “The fact that they were able to integrate visual features into complex representations suggests that face-like stimulus categorization can occur even in the absence of brain regions specialized in face processing,” the authors of the paper note. Building a virus is a bit like packing a can full of springy snakes: There’s a classic gag gift that involves stuffing a Pringles or candy container with a set of cloth-covered springs that launch out at the surprised victime when the container is opened. Apparently, these gag gifts are the perfect analogy for a virus. Researchers have followed the thermodynamics of a viral infection. It turns out that the process of stuffing the DNA into the proteins of a viral coat creates a certain amount of potential energy, which makes the reverse of the process, when the virus injects the DNA into a bacterial cell, an energetically favorable process.