A Unique Yankee Prospect

Venditte the best from every angle is an MLB article about New York Yankee pitching prospect Pat Venditte. Pat Venditte is unique in being able to throw effectively with either arm. The ambidextrous relief pitcher played for the Staten Island Yankees during the 2008 season.

His first year in minor league baseball resulted in some impressive stats. He was 1-0 with an 0.83 ERA. Venditte led the New York-Penn League with 23 saves and allowed only three earned runs in 30 games. Staten Island is a Class A farm team. Venditte is 23 years old.

An I-130 Petition Stumbling Block

A United States citizen may file an I-130 Petition on behalf of an alien spouse and secure permanent residency for such spouse but can encounter difficulties if the spouse were under exclusion, deportation, removal, or rescission proceedings regarding the right to be admitted into or to remain in the United States when the couple got married. This would also be the case if an appeal were pending regarding a decision made in any of these proceedings.

However, this obstacle to legalization can be overcome in either of two ways. Either the spouse would have to live outside the United States for at least two years following the marriage or the Petitioner must prove by clear and convincing evidence that the marriage was entered into in good faith, meaning not for the purpose of obtaining legal permanent resident status. A valid marriage certificate would be needed as evidence that the marriage was legally valid.

The I-130 Petition is currently filed with payment of a $355 filing fee. A check or money order must be payable to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Diversity Visa Lottery Registration Program

The Diversity Visa Lottery Registration Program for 2010 is currently ongoing. The begining of the online entry submission process was October 2, 2008 and the final day is December 1, 2008 at 12 Noon EST. Instructions for the program can be accessed here. Natives of the following nations are ineligible to participate in the program:

Brazil, Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Peru, Poland, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam.

To apply start here.

Helping Bees Look for Food

Bumblebees learn the sweet smell of foraging success is a Biology News Net article which points out differences in the ways bumblebees and honeybees search for food. Honeybees communicate sources of food through a waggle dance. The waggle dance gives bees in the nest information about the distance and direction of food sources.

Bumblebees rely on the release of a recruitment pheromone to facilitate the food gathering process. They can also bring back flower scents which clue in other bumblebees to look for the relevant flowers.

Cleaner Oil with Fungii?

Newly discovered fungus strips pollutants from oil reveals a new possible ally in the effort to burn cleaner fuel- a fungus discovered in Iran. The fungus is able to grow in crude oil and can metabilize sulpher and nitrogen pollutant compounds. One of the advantagous of fungus useage would be the much lower temperatures at which such compounds could be removed. Currently high temperatures are required to remove sulpher and nitrogen.

Removing sulpher from crude oil was known to be possible through the use of what are called desulphurising bacteria. In a "contest" between fungus and bacteria fungus came out as the more efficient sulpher remover. However, chemically based technologies rather than biological ones may win out in the end. A simple ester was shown to be a more rapid remover of sulpher from diesel fuel. Stay tuned.

Debating

Amanda Carpenter wrote Biden Tells 14 Lies During VP Debate. You can check the specific instances at the linked article. The post debate analytical spin by Obama supporters points out how effective truth distorting can be. Spinsters argued that Sarah Palin did not answer specific points made by Biden. It is difficult to counter a lie in a debate when the subject matter is complex and evidence for lying may require some digging. A good counter strategy entails identifying offending statements as lies but lies may not be obvious or provable without some researching.

What this says about debates is instructive. We need not assume at the close of a debate that unanswered points were either incontrovertible or that a debater was unaware of a refutation. The unawareness may pertain only to the exact data needed to point out the untruth of an opponent's claims.

Dancing Honeybees

East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees is the title of this PLOS One paper authored by Songkun Su, Fang Cai, Aung Si, Shaowu Zhang, Jürgen Tautz and Shenglu Chen. Quoting from the abstract of the paper:

The honeybee waggle dance, through which foragers advertise the existence and location of a food source to their hive mates, is acknowledged as the only known form of symbolic communication in an invertebrate. However, the suggestion, that different species of honeybee might possess distinct ‘dialects’ of the waggle dance, remains controversial. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether different species of honeybee can learn from and communicate with each other. This study reports experiments using a mixed-species colony that is composed of the Asiatic bee Apis cerana cerana (Acc), and the European bee Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml). Using video recordings made at an observation hive, we first confirm that Acc and Aml have significantly different dance dialects, even when made to forage in identical environments. When reared in the same colony, these two species are able to communicate with each other: Acc foragers could decode the dances of Aml to successfully locate an indicated food source. We believe that this is the first report of successful symbolic communication between two honeybee species; our study hints at the possibility of social learning between the two honeybee species, and at the existence of a learning component in the honeybee dance language.

So the honeybee waggle dance is the only known symbolic communication form existing among invertebrates. I did not know that. This paper also notes that two different species of honeybee- the Asiatic bee Apis cerana cerana (Acc) and Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml), the European bee- have distinct waggle dance dialects. The authors suggest a question that can be resolved experimentally namely, can different species of honeybee learn from and communicate with each other? And the answer? First a preliminary step- a quote from the paper:

Successful establishment of a mixed-species colony

We organized two types of mixed colonies consisting of an Apis cerana cerana (Acc) queen, Acc workers and Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml) workers, and two other mixed colonies consisting of an Aml queen, Aml workers and Acc workers. In the former colonies, the workers cohabited well for more than 20 days, while in the latter colonies, the Acc workers were killed and cleaned up by Aml workers after 2–3 days. Thus, we were only able to use the former mixed-species colony to carry out our experiments (see figure 1). We put the mixed colonies into observation hives when we transported them to the experimental location.

The stage is set by mixing bee colonies. The two mixed groups are Apis cerana cerana bees and Apis mellifera ligustica bees. More from the paper:

Acc and Aml possess distinct ‘dialects’ of the waggle dance

Figure 2 shows the waggle dance duration of Aml and Acc foragers, from mixed or pure colonies, that had been trained to an artificial feeder placed at different distances (100, 200, 300 and 400 m away). Under normal conditions, i.e. in single-species colonies, Acc foragers consistently had a much greater waggle duration for a given distance than did Aml foragers, as has been previously reported [13]. Further, the waggle durations of dancers from both species increased in a linear manner with increasing distance. The slope of the distance-waggle duration curve for Acc in the single-species colony was significantly steeper than that of Aml bees in the single-species colony (pairwise comparison, t-test, t = 8.8, d.f. = 6, P<0.001, Figure 3). The slope for Acc in the mixed-species colony was also significantly steeper than that of the Aml bees in the same colony (pairwise comparison, t-test, t = 4.4, d.f. = 6, P<0.01, Figure 3). Moreover, at the 100, 200, 300 and 400 meter positions, foragers of a particular species generally displayed similar waggle durations, regardless of whether they were from a single-species or mixed-species colony (P>0.05, ANOVA for Two-stage Nested Design and Tukey's test, see Table S1). The slope of the distance-waggle duration curve for Acc in the single-species colony was not significantly different to that of Acc in the mixed-species colony (pairwise comparison, t-test, t = 2.3, d.f. = 6, P>0.05, Figure 3). Similarly, the curve for Aml in the single-species colony was not significantly different to that of Aml in the mixed-species colony (pairwise comparison, t-test, t = 1.44, d.f. = 6, P>0.05, Figure 3). The waggle duration results show that there really are dialect differences between Acc and Aml. The mean dance angle, the direction of the waggle run relative to the vertical direction, was not significantly different (P>0.05, pairwise t-test) between Acc and Aml in the mixed-species colony (Table 1; see Methods for details of analysis).

Studies document the symbolic communication differences in the dances of two honeybee species, Acc and Aml. Waggle duration is a distinguishing feature.