"The Secret Life of Machines" Online!

For anyone who is interested in how things work, and anyone who likes to be entertained, there's cause to celebrate.

Artist, inventor, tinkerer and thinker Tim Hunkin and motion-picture effects friend Rex Garrod hosted the British television series "The Secret Life of Machines" between 1988 and 1993. In eighteen 35-minute episodes, these two eccentric British wizards create practical demonstrations of everyday inventions which define modern life.

The mixture of grass-roots fabrication, dry British wit, intellectualism and charm of the two rumpled presenters make these shows some of the best television - and possibly the best educational material - ever.

Now, the best science museum ever (the Exploratorium in San Francisco) is hosting all eighteen episodes as streaming video and small-format downloads.

Bomb-sniffing Bees

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently made a press announcement that they had trained honey bees to detect explosives.

By simply associating a sugar-water food source with samples of explosives, researchers have learned that they can program a "proboscis extension reflex" (their feeding mouthpart) for the bees within as little as 15 minutes. In one application, trained bees are placed inside a "sniffer box" in a tiny harness which holds their head in front of a video camera. Software detects proboscis activity and alerts operators as necessary.

This promises to provide a far more cost-effective solution for explosives detection than non-biologically based systems.

Bees sense of smell is said to rival that of dogs. Previous research efforts to use bees to detect explosives attempted to use free-flying bees as indicators, which required some method of observing their activities remotely.