Mobile Phones and Vanishing Bees

The Institute of Science in Society

The recent boom in third generation mobile phones may be the main culprit for colony collapse disorder in honeybees. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

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Colony collapse a new phenomenon

Bees worldwide have been involved in a disappearing act called “colony collapse disorder” over the past two years [1] (Mystery of Disappearing Honeybees, this series), with little sign of the disease or infestations that have resulted in massive loss of colonies in the past. The bees simply leave the hives and fail to return. Beekeepers and scientists alike are stymied as to the cause of this strange phenomenon.

One likely culprit is a new class of systemic pesticides, which are not only sprayed on crops, but also used universally to dress seeds in conventional agriculture, and can confuse and disorientate bees at very low concentrations [2] (Requiem for the Honeybee, this series). Another candidate is radiation from mobile phone base stations that has become nearly ubiquitous in Europe and North America where the bees are vanishing; this possibility is considerably strengthened by preliminary findings that bees fail to return to the hives if cordless phone base stations are placed in them.

Simple experiment with dramatic results

Researchers at Landau University in Germany designed a simple experiment for students on the Environmental Science course [3]. Eight mini-hives, each with approximately 8 000 bees were set up for the experiment. Four of them were equipped with a DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunication)-station at the bottom of the hive, and the other four without the DECT-station served as controls.

At the entrance of each hive, a transparent plastic tube enabled the experimenters to watch the marked bees entering and leaving the hive, so they can be counted and their time of return after release recorded for a period of 45 minutes.

The experimenters also studied building behaviour by measuring the area of the honeycomb and its weight.

In the course of the experiment, three colonies exposed to mobile phone radiation and one non-exposed control colony broke down. The total weights of the honeycombs in all colonies, including those at the time of breakdown were compared. The controls weighed 1 326g, while those exposed to the DECT-stations weighed only 1 045g, a difference of 21 percent. The total area of the honeycomb in the controls was 2 500, compared to just 2050 in the exposed hives.

But it was the number of returning bees and their returning times that were vastly different. For two control hives, 16 out of 25 bees returned in 45 minutes. For the two microwave-exposed hives, however, no bees at all returned to one hive, and only six returned to the other.

Cordless phone base station widely used in homes and offices

These dramatic results are of a preliminary nature, but one should bear in mind that the DECT-station is a simple cordless phone base, widely used in homes and offices.

It emits microwave radiation of about 1 900 MHz continuously, which is frequency modulated at 100 Hz. The average power is 10 mW, with a peak of 250 mW. It represents the exposure levels of perhaps tens of millions worldwide living near mobile phone base stations, or have cordless phones in their homes or offices.

The same scientists had carried out an earlier experiment with the cordless phone base on a standby mode, in which the average power is 2.5 mW, and that appeared to have had no effect on the bees [4, 5].

Clearly the present findings need to be taken much further, but their significance should not be downplayed for a number of reasons. The findings are compatible with evidence accumulating from investigations on many other species including humans, showing that mobile phone radiation is associated with a range of health hazards including cancers [6] (Drowning in a Sea of Microwaves, SiS 34). Furthermore, bees are known to be extremely sensitive to magnetic and electromagnetic fields, and there have been many suggestions that they could be used as an indicator species for electromagnetic pollution.

Bees as indicator species for electromagnetic pollution

Experiments dating well back to the last century have documented the phenomenal sensitivity of honeybees to electromagnetic fields. Bees use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate. Free-flying honeybees are able to detect static intensity fluctuations as weak as 26 nT against the background earth-strength magnetic field (average 500 mT) [7]. This has been demonstrated in experiments where individual honeybees have been trained to discriminate between the presence and the absence of a small static magnetic anomaly in the lab. Honeybees can also learn to distinguish between two 360o panoramic patterns that are identical except for the compass orientation. In this case, the difference was a 90o rotation about the vertical axis [8]. The most powerful cue to direction for the honeybee comes from the sky, but discrimination between patterns is possible in the absence of celestial information, as when the sky is overcast. Under those conditions, bees can use a magnetic direction to discriminate between patterns.

The bees’ waggle dance on the honeycomb, which tells hive mates where to find food, can also be misdirected by anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field or very weak pulsed magnetic fields at about 250 MHz applied in the correct direction [9]. Bees can even learn to detect very low levels of extremely low frequency alternating electromagnetic fields [10].

But mobile phones have been around for close to 20 years, so why now? There has been a recent change in cell phone technology that coincides with the current crisis. At the beginning of the present century, 3G (third generation) mobile phone systems became publicly available, leading to a surge in popularity of mobile phones, and many more phone towers [11]. Bees are disappearing in North America, Europe and also Australia, wherever mobile phones are greatly in use. Stay tuned.

NATURE | Silence of the Bees | The Importance of Bees

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Dell: Asia PC shipments rise faster than average

Dell says its Asia PC shipments are growing much faster than the industry average

Wednesday October 22, 10:34 am ET 

NEW YORK (AP) -- Computer company Dell Inc. said Wednesday its PC shipments in the Asia-Pacific region continue to grow faster than the industry average, according to preliminary data from research firm IDC.

Dell said IDC estimates that its shipments grew 35 percent in the third quarter, three times faster than the industry average. 

The Round Rock, Texas-based company, which is the world's No. 2 PC maker after Hewlett-Packard Co., plans to post third-quarter results on Nov. 20. 

Shares fell 34 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $12.26 in morning trading.

Chinese surfers see red over Microsoft black-outs

By Kitty Bu 

BEIJING, Oct 22 (Reuters) - Chinese Internet users have expressed fury at Microsoft's launch of an anti-piracy tool targeting Chinese computer users to ensure they buy genuine software. 

The "Windows Genuine Advantage" programme, which turns the user's screen black if the installed software fails a validation test, is Microsoft's latest weapon in its war on piracy in China, where the vast majority of 200 million computer users are believed to be using counterfeit software, unwittingly or not. 

"Why is Microsoft automatically connected with my computer? The computer is mine!" one angry blogger wrote on popular Chinese web portal Sina.com. "Microsoft has no right to control my hardware without my agreement." 

Another blogger railed over the cost of authorised versions. 

"If the price of genuine software was lower than the fake one, who would buy the fake one?" he wrote. 

A visitor to a Beijing internet cafe said Microsoft was violating people's rights. 

"If, when I'm programming, the computer screen goes black, that will probably cause some important information to be lost," he said. "Who will pay me for my loss then?" 

Dong Zhengwei, 35, a Beijing lawyer, described Microsoft as the "biggest hacker in China with its intrusion into users' computer systems without their agreement or any judicial authority", the China Daily said. 

"Microsoft's measure will cause serious functional damage to users' computers and, according to China's criminal law, the company can stand accused of breaching and hacking into computer systems," he was quoted as saying. 

"I respect the right of Microsoft to protect its intellectual property, but it is taking on the wrong target with wrong measures. They should target producers and sellers of fake software, not users." 

The software giant defended the programme on its website as part of its "commitment to help protect its intellectual property and to help you avoid problems before they happen". 

"The purpose ... is to help our customers to determine (if) genuine software is installed on their computers," Microsoft told Reuters. 

(Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Jakarta to host "Pesta Blogger" on Saturday

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta 

Information and Communication Minister Mohammad Nuh said on Wednesday that Jakarta would host this year's national blogger gathering on Saturday, heralding the theme "Blogging for Society". 

Nuh said the event was to be titled Pesta Blogger 2008 and would be held in the BPPT II building on Jl M.H. Thamrin, Central Jakarta. Nuh added that the gathering would be attended by the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia Cameron R. Hume. 

"To establish an information-based society, we need creativity. Events like this undoubtedly give people room to express themselves," Nuh said, as quoted by kompas.com. 

The event's administrative chairman, Wicaksono, said bloggers from across Indonesia would participate, and that his team expected to double the attendance levels seen at last year's gathering. 

"We hope this event will make a positive contribution to society," Wicaksono said. (and)

Reports: Google CEO to stump for Obama

Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal 

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Schmidt has also been providing unofficial advice to the Democratic hopeful on energy and technology issues, and speculation swirls around whether he could be in line for a Chief Technical Officer post Obama has said he would create in his administration.

Schmidt has said Google is neutral in the campaign. The Mountain View-based company's employees have donated a total of $487,355 to Obama's campaign, according to reports. They've given $20,600 to Sen. John McCain's.

Both Obama and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) have said they are in favor of limiting the rate changes Internet providers can make for different levels of service. 

Schmidt follows on the heels of other tech executives who also became involved in the presidential race: former Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina, San Jose-baed eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman and San Jose-based Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) CEO John Chambes have been advising and stumping for McCain.

H-P Plans to Unveil Smart Phone

Justin Scheck, The Wall Street Journal

Hewlett-Packard Co., aiming to grow its device business beyond corporate users, is preparing to release a new smart phone that will also be marketed to consumers, according to people briefed on the plan. The device will debut in Europe, these people say, and will be sold by a mobile carrier in retail stores.

The new device will have a touchscreen and keypad and will use Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system, say people briefed on the plan. It will be able to send and receive emails, and access the Internet.

The phone is the latest version of H-P's iPaq devices. H-P, which has been 

selling iPaq-branded devices since it acquired personal-computer maker Compaq Computer Corp. in 2002, primarily focused earlier iPaqs on businesses and typically didn't sell them through retail stores.

The new phone will likely be released in Europe within the next two months, say people familiar with the matter. It will later be released world-wide.

H-P spokesman Mike Hockey said the most recent iPaq device, a business-oriented smart phone, was launched in June. H-P trails behind manufacturers like Nokia Corp. and Research in Motion Ltd. in world-wide smart-phone sales, according to market researcher IDC, with less than a 3.3% global market share. Mr. Hockey said, "the iPaq brand is extremely strong around the world, especially in the European market."

Globalization and IT: Exclusive CIO Survey

It's official: Today's CIOs are global. Explore the details of Smart Enterprise's international survey of IT leaders. 

By Bob Violino, Smart Enterprise

Today's CIOs need to think globally—and act globally. Exclusive new research by Smart Enterprise shows just how globalized business has become, and the huge impact it has had on CIOs and their IT operations. In fact, globalization affects nearly every facet of IT and the CIO's role in the organization. What's more, at a time when the sluggish U.S. economy is straining many IT projects, globalization provides CIOs with a new opportunity to invest in technology that can help their organizations expand into new markets. 

While most enterprises already do business internationally, what's new is the central role IT now plays. CIOs support international expansion efforts, and they are expected to help their organizations succeed in today's global marketplace. 

Indeed, more than 60 percent of IT executives in the U.S. work for organizations that serve customers outside the country, according to the Smart Enterprise "2008 Globalization & IT" survey. Nearly the same percentage of U.S. respondents have business operations or offices outside the U.S. Half have non-U.S. product suppliers, and more than 40 percent work with international third-party technology service providers or shared services. In fact, just one-quarter of the 350 executives worldwide surveyed by Smart Enterprise work for organizations that operate only in the U.S. (For more on the survey methodology, see "How the Globalization & IT Survey Was Conducted") 

Other key findings of the Smart Enterprise "2008 Globalization & IT" survey: 

• Globalization has led CIOs to increase spending in areas that include security, IT infrastructure, network infrastructure and compliance. For example, more than 40 percent of the survey respondents say globalization has driven them to spend more on IT infrastructure this year.
  
• Globalization affects the way IT executives address several key issues, including planning, collaboration, leadership and compliance. For example, when it comes to leadership, globalization affects the way over 65 percent of IT executives manage up, and how 75 percent handle relationships with partners and suppliers.
  
• The leading driver of accelerated IT projects is globalization. In fact, among respondents who are accelerating major projects, nearly 70 percent attribute the acceleration to globalization.
  
• To support global efforts, organizations rely on a variety of technology solutions. These include network and end-point security, online collaboration, teleconferencing, and network and storage consolidation and virtualization.
  
• To help support global issues, technology leaders believe they must enhance a number of their own professional skills, including their understanding of business issues, leadership skills and technical skills.
  
  

Read whole article  ....

America, We Have A Problem

Norman R. Augustine, Forbes.com,  March 24 2008, 6:00 AM ET

Congress recently scrambled to place a $152 billion Band-Aid on the nation's economy, but the underlying problems are likely to require such fixes with increasing frequency in the future.

These problems were brought to the fore three years ago when the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine--organizations that count 195 Nobel Laureates among their membership--conducted a study on America's ability to compete for jobs in an emerging global economy where five chemists in China or 20 assembly workers in Vietnam can be hired for the cost of one of these workers in America, and where physicians in India now read the CAT scans of patients in American hospitals. 

The resulting report, titled Rising Above the Gathering Storm, concluded that without both a dramatic increase in investment in basic research and reform of the nation's K-12 educational system, America's children are likely to have a lower standard of living than their parents. 

The report's warning did not go unheeded. 

A new research university is scheduled to launch soon with a day-one endowment of $10 billion, equal to what it took MIT 142 years to accumulate. Next year, over 200,000 students will study abroad, mostly in the fields of science and engineering, often under government-provided scholarships. Government investment in nondefense R&D is set to increase by 25% over the next few years. 

A multi-year initiative is under way to make the country a global nanotechnology hub. The world's most powerful particle accelerator will begin operation this year. And a high-level commission will conduct a followup to the Gathering Storm study with the objective of creating more jobs at home. 

The problem is that these actions were taken by Saudi Arabia, China, the U.K., India, Switzerland and Australia, respectively. As chair of the committee that wrote Gathering Storm, I have been asked to speak about its findings from Japan to Canada and from Australia to Europe. But what about America? 

Since the report was issued, the world-renowned Fermilab in Illinois responded to reductions in government research funding with layoffs and mandatory two-day-a-month unpaid "holidays" for its research staff. The U.S. portion of the international program to develop plentiful energy through nuclear fusion is being reduced to "survival mode." 

The U.S. trade deficit in high-technology goods further increased. Nearly all major U.S. high-tech firms now have research laboratories outside the country and are poised to expand them. American companies spent three times more on litigation than on research. 

Eighty percent of American CFOs surveyed said they would curtail R&D in order to meet short-term profit projections. The latest international standardized test for high school seniors in 30 nations revealed that students in only four nations performed significantly worse than U.S. students in science, and only five rated worse in math. Two-thirds of the Ph.D.s in engineering awarded by U.S. universities went to non-U.S. citizens. And U.S. K-12 teachers were reported to have worked 43 hours to earn $1,000, while Kobe Bryant earned that amount in five minutes and 30 seconds, and Howard Stern in only 24 seconds. 

Industrial firms in the U.S. and elsewhere have found an answer to these problems. 

Howard High, spokesman for Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) prior to his retirement, explains, "We go where the smart people are. Now our business operations are two-thirds in the U.S. and one-third overseas. But that ratio will flip over in the next 10 years." General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ) spokesman Greg Martin put it: "We're a global car company that happens to be based in the U.S." Addressing root causes, Bill Gates observed, "When I compare our high schools with what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I'm terrified for our workforce of tomorrow." 

The irony is that America's leaders seem convinced of the importance of fixing K-12 math and science education and increasing government investment in basic research. In fact, the president made specific proposals to those ends in his 2006 State of the Union address, and the resulting authorization passed in the House 397-20 and the Senate by unanimous consent. However, due to an avalanche of 12,000 earmarks (Stanislaw Lee observed that "each snowflake in an avalanche pleads 'not guilty' "), and exacerbated by what can perhaps best be characterized as a system failure, the omnibus budget act that actually provides the funds to implement the government's programs failed to address America's competitiveness in any meaningful way. 

Churchill said that you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else. Our nation's leaders need to succeed in their bipartisan efforts to help Americans compete in a job market increasingly dominated by 3 billion would-be capitalists who entered the workplace after many of the world's political systems were restructured at the end of the last century. Otherwise, our nation's greatest export is likely to be our jobs and our standard of living. 

Norman Augustine is retired chairman of Lockheed Martin, former undersecretary of the Army and past chair of the National Academy of Engineering.

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Gartner IT Security Summit: Unilever launches staff security drive

Warwick Ashford, www.computerweekly.com, 15:43 29 Sep

Food manufacturer Unilever is tackling the human element of information security by introducing a global awareness programme across the organisation.

The company has recognised that most data breaches are not caused by technology failure, but by the lack of secure behaviour by employees with access to company data.

More than 140,000 IT users across the business in 150 countries will be required to complete a 20-minute security briefing and test in the coming months.

The second-life styled interactive online programme contains guidelines on how best to protect information in a variety of different business situations.

The "teach and test" programme, which is customised according to each employee's role, has been introduced as part of the company's information security communication initiative.

Andrew Strong, global security director at Unilever, said, "The initiative is aimed at changing the perception of security and ensuring each employee understands what is good behaviour for keeping information safe."

The "teach and test" programme is available through a security portal, which the company plans to use to update employees on changing security risks, procedures and policies.

"We can easily communicate key contemporary issues such as how to deal with laptop security checks at airports," said Strong.

Unilever plans to conduct regular internal and external surveys to measure behavioural change and assess whether key risks are being addressed and adapt security training accordingly.

Ballmer Still Searching for an Answer to Google

James Niccolai, IDG News Service

Microsoft may be the only company in a position to provide "any real competition" for Google in the online search business, CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday. But first it will need to figure out a way to do it.

"We need to do some work to fundamentally reinvent the search business model," Ballmer said during a dinner at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. "You don't brute-force your way into a market. You only make great strides when you redefine the category for the user."

And that will take some time. "It's a five-year task," Ballmer said. But Microsoft is ready to spend a lot of money trying. The company told its shareholders recently that it was prepared to lose "5 to 10 percent of total operating income for several years" to improve its position in search, Ballmer said.

The CEO offered little in the way of new insights during the evening, except that Microsoft will discuss "Project Red Dog," its secretive cloud computing initiative, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference next month.

Red Dog has been described as "EC2 for Windows," a comparison with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, said Ann Winblad, the venture capitalist who posed the questions to Ballmer. She asked him to elaborate but he said she would have to wait for the conference in six weeks.

Asked about server virtualization, Ballmer said Microsoft aims to "democratize" the technology by offering lower prices, integrated management tools and better-quality software. "If you want to have virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent, you'd better not charge three times the price of the server for the software," he said, in a jab at market leader VMware, which has been criticized for high prices.

Asked about smartphones, Ballmer said Nokia, Research in Motion and Apple will all lose out as the market expands over the next five years, because they design their own proprietary hardware and tie it closely to their software.

Nokia leads the smartphone market today with about a 30 percent share, he said. "If you want to reach more than that, you have to separate the hardware and software in the platform," he said.

In other words, he thinks the same strategy that helped Microsoft become the leader on the desktop -- licensing its OS for use by other hardware makers -- will let it win out on smartphones. Long term, he said, the battle will be between the Symbian OS (which is now open source), mobile versions of Linux and Windows Mobile.

Apple won't boost its share of the personal computer market or become a threat in the enterprise for similar reasons, according to Ballmer -- because it won't license its software to others.

"Apple's a good company, I won't take anything away from them, but they have a certain kind of strategy. They believe in putting the hardware and software together, they don't believe in letting other people make it."

"I'm not saying there isn't a threat" from Apple, he said. But if Microsoft and its PC partners "do our jobs right, there's really no reason Apple should get any footprint in the enterprise."

Microsoft does "very well on balance" when it comes to software developers, he said. But the company has two areas of weakness, according to Ballmer: high-performance and technical computing -- which is important to Microsoft because "there are 5 million engineers and they use a lot of compute power" -- and in Web server applications, where it is losing out to Linux and PHP.

"Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux," he said. "How are we doing? Forty is less than 60, so I don't like it. ... We have some work to do."

Winblad asked about the health of the IT business in light of the economic crisis in the U.S. "At least for now, people I talk to in our business are relatively -- I wouldn't say optimistic -- but feel better than if all you did was watch CNBC all day," Ballmer said, referring to the U.S. television news channel.

A member of the audience asked Ballmer how he manages his stress and stays healthy. Ballmer, who looks thinner and fitter than he did a few years ago, said his regime consists of PowerBars "to keep the blood sugar steady," "a constant dose of caffeine," and running.

"I did a five-mile run this morning. It does a lot to ease the stress and set up a good day."