Poor Mojo's Newswire

African farmers have tried everything to stop errant elephants from trampling over their land and crops: from burning tyres and shining torches, to erecting physical barriers. Now, it seems, bees could be the answer to their prayers.

Experiments carried out by Lucy King of the University of Oxford and colleagues suggest that even the sound of bees is enough to send elephants scampering away instantly.

"They really bolted," says King, who played 4-minute recordings of bees to 17 herds of elephants in Kenya's Buffalo Springs and Samburo National Reserves. "One herd even ran across a river to get away," she adds.

Local anaesthetics such as lignocaine work by diffusing into all neurons and blocking channels that transport sodium ions across cell membranes - leaving the person in the dentist's chair pain-free but numb.

Clifford Woolf and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have now discovered a way of blocking just the pain neurons using capsaicin - the active ingredient in chilli peppers - along with a version of lignocaine that can't diffuse through cell membranes unassisted.

Astronomers have found the most Sun-like star yet, and they say it is an ideal place to hunt for alien civilisations.

The star, called HIP 56948, lies a little more than 200 light years from Earth. Its size, mass, temperature, and chemical makeup are all so similar to the Sun's that no measurable differences could be found in high-resolution observations made by the 2.7-metre telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, US.

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That similarity might be important, since some studies have suggested that stars with less lithium are less active, experiencing fewer outbursts, or flares, that can bathe planets in deadly radiation, says Ramirez. If that is borne out by further observations, this star probably has a higher chance of harbouring life than other solar doppelgangers, he says.

For most of us, fear of flab is the reason we exercise, the motivation that drives us to the gym. It’s also why public-health authorities have taken to encouraging ever more exercise as part of a healthy lifestyle. If we’re fat or fatter than ideal, we work out. Burn calories. Expend energy. Still fat? Burn more. The dietary guidelines of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, now recommend that we engage in up to 60 minutes daily of “moderate to vigorous intensity” physical activity just to maintain weight—that is, keep us from fattening further. Considering the ubiquity of the message, the hold it has on our lives, and the elegant simplicity of the notion—burn calories, lose weight—wouldn’t it be nice to believe it were true? The catch is that science suggests it’s not, and so the answer to all of the above quiz questions is “no.”

Just last month, the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine published joint guidelines for physical activity and health. They suggested that 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week is necessary to “promote and maintain health.” What they didn’t say, though, was that more physical activity will lead us to lose weight. Indeed, the best they could say about the relationship between fat and exercise was this: “It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.” In other words, despite half a century of efforts to prove otherwise, scientists still can’t say that exercise will help keep off the pounds.