This method of keeping elephants away from crops is really the bee’s knees
Q. One writer called him “The Man with the Golden Arm,” so you might guess he’s a pro athlete or perhaps an accomplished musician. Well, guess again and make it “out of the box.” A. First, some medical background: Blood can be “Rh+” (with the Rhesus protein, named after that found in the blood of Rhesus monkeys) or “Rh-” (without the protein), explains Dan Lewis in his book “Now I Know.” If a pregnant woman is Rh- but the fetus inherits Rh+ from the father, her immune system may actually attack the fetus’s bloodstream — known as Rhesus disease — causing the fetus to be mildly anemic at birth or even to be stillborn.
Enter Australian James Harrison, who as a teen had a lung removed in a procedure requiring major blood transfusions. Afterward he vowed to “repay the favor” and became a blood donor himself. Early on, his blood plasma was shown to contain a rare antibody that could be used for a vaccine against Rhesus disease.
Since 1954, the “man with the golden arm” has donated plasma about 18 times a year, and in 2011, he set a record with his 1,000th donation. Hundreds of thousands of women — including his own daughter — have received the vaccine, and “Harrison’s antibody has been used to treat more than 2 million babies who would otherwise have Rhesus disease.” Q. Some apparently difficult math problems have wonderfully simple solutions if you just look at them from the right perspective. Try this one: Two trains, each traveling at 10 miles per hour, are 20 miles apart on a single track heading towards each other. A bee leaves the front of the first train and flies toward the second train at 20 mph. When it reaches the second train, it immediately reverses direction and flies back towards the first train, still at 20 mph. And when it gets back to the first train, it turns around again and keeps going back and forth until the trains eventually collide, squashing the bee. Now how far does the bee fly before its demise? (You can do this in your head, we promise!) A. The trains will collide at the midpoint of the 20-mile track, each having travelled 10 miles. Since the trains’ speeds are 10 mph, the collision will happen after 1 hour. Since the bee is always travelling at 20 mph, independent of its direction, the bee must travel a total of 20 miles.
When presented with this problem, most of us try a brute force approach, summing the distances the bee travels during its (infinitely numerous) back-and-forth trips. Though that approach works, it requires knowledge of some advanced techniques. When doing mathematics, it’s sometimes “smart” to be lazy! Q. How are researchers helping Kenyan and other African farmers get the local elephants to “buzz off ” and leave the crops alone? This classic confrontation leaves farmers as well as pachyderms dead in its wake. A. By exploiting the big beasts’ natural fear of bees, says John R. Platt in “Scientific American” magazine. Supported by the Elephants and Bees Project of “Save the Elephants,” farmers are building wire bee fences that are strung with hives. According to “Conservation Biology,” “the buzzing fences have kept out 80% of the elephants that have approached them.” (A lot of elephant and human lives have been spared in the process.) “These special barriers also provide locals with revenue from honey,” says project leader Lucy King.
An altogether different approach is that of “Air Shepherd,” which uses the buzzing sound of drone quadcopters to trick elephants into thinking bees are in the area and thus chase them away from crop fences. One drone has the capacity to move a herd of 100 elephants.