A bee’s favorite color can help it to find more food from the flowers in their environment, according to new research from Queen Mary, University of London.

Dr Nigel Raine and Professor Lars Chittka from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences studied nine bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colonies from southern Germany, and found that the colonies which favored purple blooms were more successful foragers.

Dr Raine explains: “In the area we studied, violet flowers produced the most nectar - far more than the next most rewarding flower color (blue).

Freeing knotted shoelaces with fingers that are frozen stiff is extremely difficult and can even be painful. The reason that sensitivity and dexterity are poor is that both nerves and muscles perform their tasks reluctantly when they are cold.

Nevertheless ice-cold fingers ache and do so all the more in response to the lightest of knocks or squeezing. As unpleasant as this is, it serves as protection against frost lesion. The question of how pain can still be registered despite the otherwise hampered function during cooling has recently been explained.

They have demonstrated that the endings of nerves normally involved in signaling pain are equipped with a frost tolerant igniter of nerve impulses.

LaCie has announced it has boosted the capacity of its d2 SAFE Hard Drive to 1TB in a compact 2 x 6 x 7in casing.

The d2 SAFE hard drive is designed to keep intruders away from private data, and comes equipped with a biometric sensor, 128-bit AES hardware encryption technology, and chain lock port for maximum protection against unauthorized use.

Up to 10 fingerprints (five users with minimum two prints each) can be registered with personal and customized access privileges such as full access to the disk (read/write) or read-only. Once registered, a simple finger swipe locks and unlocks the disk.

According to LaCie, 1TB capacity allows users to store millions of documents and presentations, 333,000 high-resolution photos, 250,000 MP3s, or 358 movies.

Tissue Regeneration Therapeutics Inc. will exclusively license its human umbilical cord perivascular cell (HUCPVC) technology to Stem Cell Authority Ltd. for family stem cell banking in the U.S.

The technology originated at the University of Toronto and has been offered to the public in Canada since March 2007 through a licensing agreement between TRT and Toronto-based CReAte Cord Blood Bank (CCBB).

“Toronto is the first place in the world to bank perivascular mesenchymal stem cells from the human umbilical cord and we are extremely pleased to now be able to provide this opportunity to parents across the U.S.,” says Professor John E. Davies.

A team of researchers, led by surgeons at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson in Philadelphia, has found further evidence supporting the ability of a protein to predict how well a patient with advanced pancreatic cancer will do after surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. The levels of the protein CA 19-9 in the blood can be used to determine the need for further therapy, they say.

Adam Berger, M.D., assistant professor of surgery at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, and his co-workers examined CA 19-9 levels and the survival of 385 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer who were treated with surgery and subsequent chemotherapy and radiation.

Just a few years ago, the average computer user’s documents, applications and even photos seemed to rattle around a 120 GB disk drive. Today’s multimedia-intensive user can exhaust that capacity in no time and engineers expect to max out conventional magnetic storage techniques by about 2010.

At that point, they’ll be looking for nanotechnology to step up.

A magnetic storage surface – the disk of a hard-disk drive -- consists of tiny sectors of magneti-cally-aligned particles. When the read-write head of a disk drive passes over a sector, it flips the magnetic field to the opposite direction – encoding a zero or a one. When it reads, it senses the magnetic field for the whole sector.