Decoding Genes of Social Behavior in Honey Bees

Researcher Saurab Sinha at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is trying to decode the genes governing social behavior in honey bees. Sinha and colleagues are trying to find the social gene which lets bees change roles in the hive based on social pressure.

Adult bees start by working as nurses of young bees, and will turn into foragers for nectar and pollen when they get older. However, if the hive has a need, some young bees will turn into foragers prematurely. The job transition involves changing thousands of genes in the honey bee's brain, turning some genes off, and others on.

Saurab Sinha and colleagues hope to use the bee gene sequences they discovered as a model of socially triggered role changes in human brains.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coolhunts for 4/16/07 to 5/11/07

Monday, April 16, 2007 New York Times online http://www.nytimes.com Technorati http://www.technorati.com Treehugger http://www.treehugger.com Tuesday, April 17, 2007 Micropersuasion http://www.micropersuasion.com Twitter http://twitter.com/steverubel/statuses/26737381 Who Is Sick? http://whoissick.org/sickness/ HealthMap http://healthmap.org/ Open Directory Project http://www.dmoz.org Wednesday, April 18, 2007 They Rule http://www.theyrule.net Free Beer http://www.freebeer.org/blog/ Thursday, April 19, 2007 Creative Commons http://www.creativecommons.org Innocentive http://www.innocentive.com Rite Solutions http://RiteSolutions.com Friday, April 20, 2007 Galaxy Advisors http://www.galaxyadvisors.com IMDB http://www.imdb.com TeCFlow http://www.ickn.org/ickndemo Digg http://www.digg.com Monday, April 23, 2007 O'Reilly Radar http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/freebase_will_p_1.html Mashable http://www.mashable.com/ MySpace is Better Than Porn http://mashable.com/2007/04/20/mysp
Read more

Scientists, Monks and Bankers - It's All About Love

Why do people collaboratively engage in innovative tasks? What’s the motivation to work together to develop something new? After all, if I do everything by myself, I will reap all the rewards for myself, and don’t have to share. Nevertheless, humans are the most social species of all, and progress is only possible by collectively creating new things “standing on the shoulders of giants”, by learning from what others have done, and apply it in novel ways. According to my colleagues at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Tom Malone , Rob Laubacher , and Chris Dellarocas there are three main reasons why people engage in collective intelligence systems: Money – financial gain is a strong motivator for people participating in markets and traditional organizations, either for direct payment, or for future payment, e.g. acquiring new skills. Glory – getting recognition and building up a reputation can be an important motivator. Love – love can be an important motivator, be it beca
Read more

If good people make AI, can AI make good people?

Image
The developers of ChatGPT built extremely useful software, putting a “Wikipedia on steroids” at our fingertips by leveraging collective intelligence in ways never seen before. In this sense, as defined by Plato and Aristotle over two thousand years ago, they are “good people”. This means they are morally good or virtuous by giving away a highly beneficial software product for free that makes many chores of the daily life of knowledge workers much easier. These AI developers are thus acting according to the golden rule (of reciprocity), treating others as they would like to be treated. The problem is that not everybody who writes AI software is a “good” person. If only one percent of AI developers acts entirely egoistic, or even malicious, there is the risk that these “bad apples” will abuse the power of AI for their own sinister purposes, without any consideration for the wellbeing of the rest of us. But what if we could turn the power of AI on these “bad apples”, to identify them be
Read more