Bee hives provide the means for pollination of almond orchard, California.
Credit: Shutterstock

YOLO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA  — It’s a crime straight out of the wild west with a with a California twist. Bee rustlers have become the state’s new outlaws. It’s the farmers who are getting stung.

The gentle hum of bees is music to farmers in California’s heartland. Farmers do the planting but bees are the key to their crop’s success.

Farmers know it, and in Yolo County, so do criminals. One good hit, and the bad guys can net $350-$600 in just one minute.

In the middle of night, thieves steal boxes of bees in hopes of renting them out to farmers as their own for thousands of dollars, or starting their own colonies.

How do they get away with it? Sometimes thieves are experienced bee keepers. In the eyes of the victims, they are cruel. They roll up and rip the bees from their homes ruthlessly.

“Sometimes they use a forklift,” says Henry Harland, a bee farmer in Yolo county. He says mistreating bees […]

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Microscopic images of nanobots.

In a case of science fiction meeting reality, microscopic “machines” have journeyed inside a living animal for the first time.

The tiny devices delivered a cargo of nano-particles into the stomach lining of a mouse.

The research by scientists at the University of California is published in the journal ACS Nano.

Medical applications for micro-machines include the release of drugs into specific locations within the body.

But until now, they have only been tested in laboratory cell samples.

A team led by Professors Liangfang Zhang and Joseph Wang from UC, San Diego fed the tiny motors to mice.

The machines, made of polymer tubes coated with zinc, are just 20 micrometres long – the width of a strand of human hair.

In stomach acid, the zinc reacts to produce bubbles of hydrogen, which propel the machines into the lining of the stomach, where they attach.

As the machines dissolve, they deliver their cargoes into the stomach tissue.

The researchers say the method may offer an efficient way to deliver drugs into the stomach, to treat […]

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This article is part of an ongoing series analyzing how baby boomers — those born from 1946 to 1964 in the U.S. — behave differently from other generations as consumers and in the workplace. The series also explores how the aging of the baby-boom generation will affect politics and well-being.

PRINCETON, N.J. — Older generations of Americans are much more likely to describe their political views as conservative than as liberal. This includes the large baby boom generation, of whom 44% identified as conservative and 21% as liberal last year. That 23-percentage-point conservative advantage is less than the 31-point edge for the older traditionalist generation, but greater than those for Generation Xers and millennials. In fact, millennials are about as likely to say they are liberal as to say they are conservative.

The results are based on aggregated data from 14 separate Gallup polls conducted in 2014, including interviews with more than 16,000 U.S. adults, aged 18 and older.

The ideological differences across the major generations in the U.S. are consistent with generational differences in party preferences, as older generations tend to be more Republican and younger generations more Democratic.

Older generations are also […]

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Norfolk Flooding Credit: michael-in-norfolk.blogspot.com

President Barack Obama on Friday signed an executive order requiring that all federally funded construction projects take into account flood risks linked to global warming. The order directs federal agencies to adopt stricter building and siting standards.

The executive order represents a major shift for the federal government: while the Federal Emergency Management Administration published a memo three years ago saying it would take global warming into account when preparing for more severe storms, most agencies continue to rely on historical data rather than future projections for building projects.

The new standard gives agencies three options for establishing the flood elevation and hazard area they use in siting, design and construction of federally funded projects. They can use data and methods “informed by best-available, actionable climate science”; build 2 feet above the 100-year flood elevation for standard projects and 3 feet above for critical buildings such as hospitals and evacuation centers; or build to the 500-year flood elevation.

The new policy does not make changes to the National Flood Insurance Program, which covers Americans in flood-prone areas with federally backed insurance […]

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