Bees have been around for 110 million years or so, but it was only a couple of thousand years ago that we started to grasp their potential for helping humanity. The ancient Mayans were among the first, harnessing the stingless Middle American honey bee for agriculture. Their shamans revered the creatures, believing that each one had a soul.

Later studies have confirmed this intuitive respect for their intelligence. The Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) dedicated his life to deciphering how honey bees communicate, discovering that by dancing, vertically, in the dark, they signal the exact location of nectar, pollen, water and tree resin, or other important information.

He also found that bees can count to five, and trained them to visit feeding stations at specific periods of the day. Bees, he found, have a memory for time and space, using landmarks such as trees, rock formations or barns to help guide themselves. This system – and the ability to count – is employed when deciding on where to build a new hive. Scouts seek out various options, then propose a vote: 15 is the crucial number for a quorum.

Bees also rely heavily on scent to perform daily activities. A worker bee’s […]

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NEW YORK — Whoever invented the ‘laptop’ probably didn’t worry too much about male reproductive health.

Turns out, unsurprisingly, that sitting with a computer on your lap will crank up the temperature of your nether regions, which could affect sperm quality.

And there is little you can do about it, according to the authors of a study out today in the journal Fertility and Sterility, short of putting your laptop on a desk.

The researchers hooked thermometers to the scrotums of 29 young men who were balancing a laptop on their knees. They found that even with a lap pad under the computer, the men’s scrotums overheated quickly.

‘Millions and millions of men are using laptops now, especially those in the reproductive age range,’ said Dr. Yefim Sheynkin, a urologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who led the new study.

‘Within 10 or 15 minutes their scrotal temperature is already above what we consider safe, but they don’t feel it,’ he added.

So far, no studies have actually tested how laptops impact men’s fertility, said Sheynkin, and there is no bulletproof evidence that it would. But earlier research has shown that warming the scrotum more than one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees […]

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In September, four soldiers at Ft. Hood — veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — took their own lives in the course of one week. More than a hundred Army troops have killed themselves this year. Host Scott Simon talks with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his wife, Deborah, about the increased efforts to curb suicides by military servicemen and women.

SCOTT SIMON, host:

In September, four soldiers at Fort Hood, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, took their own lives in a single week. More than 120 U.S. Army troops have killed themselves this year. Earlier this week, we went to the Pentagon to discuss the tragedy of the growing number of suicides in the U.S. armed forces with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and his wife Deborah.

The Mullens have struggled to find a link among these suicides.

Admiral MIKE MULLEN (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff): There’s just a lot we don’t know. And we have doubled our rate since 2004. We now exceed the rate in the population in the country. As I’ve looked into this and tried to understand it, it turns out […]

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — For the first time, federal scientists have found damage to deep sea coral and other marine life on the ocean floor several miles from the blown-out BP well – a strong indication that damage from the spill could be significantly greater than officials had previously acknowledged.

Tests are needed to verify that the coral died from oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, but the chief scientist who led the government-funded expedition said Friday he was convinced it was related.

‘What we have at this point is the smoking gun,’ said Charles Fisher, a biologist with Penn State University who led the expedition aboard the Ronald Brown, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel.

‘There is an abundance of circumstantial data that suggests that what happened is related to the recent oil spill,’ Fisher said.

For the government, the findings were a departure from earlier statements. Until now, federal teams have painted relatively rosy pictures about the spill’s effect on the sea and its ecosystem, saying they had not found any damage on the ocean floor.

In early August, a federal report said that nearly 70 percent of the 170 million gallons […]

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Zhou Yuan, head of asset allocation at China Investment Corporation (CIC), said Beijing would be willing to invest in such projects. CIC manages part of China’s massive foreign exchange reserves, an estimated 300 billion in both domestic and overseas investments.

‘We are advocating that the US government start a program to invest a massive amount of equity, in the form of public and private equity partnership, in US infrastructure,

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