A zapping idea

The microwave oven didn’t only make cooking convenient, it also created the possibility to harness a large amount of power inside the home. The energy generated by conventional microwaves to heat up frozen dinners can be amplified to burn skin or detonate electronics. Normally, a megawatt magnetron (a device much bigger than that in household microwaves) is needed to produce energy of that magnitude, but two inventors from New Mexico have found a way to make such energy by tearing apart ordinary microwave ovens. By gathering a few hundred magnetron tubes from these ovens in a series and reflecting the microwave energy of each tube into the next magnetron tube, the inventors greatly amplified of the microwave energy of the initial tube. In fact, magnetrons from just three hundred household microwaves were enough to generate megawatt pulses that can set off explosives and toast human skin. The scariest part of the invention is that the recently published patent application for the device is publicly available in the U.S.

Source: New Scientist Tech

-Jennifer Huen

Oh bee, oh my

The honeybee was in the spotlight this week in several major science journals-starting with the publication of the full sequence of the insect’s genome. One paper by biologists at Berkeley estimated that pollinators like birds, bats, and bees, currently affect 35 per cent of the world’s crop production. This study comes in response to another recent study reporting the decline of the honeybee due to infestations of parasitic mites, new antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the wild, and competition from Africanized “killer” honeybees. Using the published genome, a third study reported a genetic and evolutionary difference between the common North American honeybee and the “killer” honeybee. All modern honeybees came from Africa and then spread into two lineages in Europe and Asia. European bees have been cultivated for agricultural use and do not have the killer instincts of the African honeybee. Since the introduction of “killer” honeybees to South America in the 1950s, the crossing of European-derived bees with “killer” bees are creating strange genetic results, most of which still need to be studied before concrete conclusions can be drawn.

Source: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Nature, Science

-Sandy Huen