URINE SMELL DETECTOR - honeybees

URINE SMELL DETECTOR

Idea: to find a substance in the Urine that tells information about kidney cancer (benign or not, severe or slight, early detection.)

Security Research – Techniques for Finding Explosives

Berlin is to host a European Conference on Security Research at the end of March. The German government will present its civil security program which is geared towards dealing with terrorism, organised crime and natural catastrophes.

We take a look at what science has to contribute to improving security including a researcher in Britain, Mathilde Briens, who is training bees to detect explosives.

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A completely new kind of anti-terrorist unit is being bred ten kilometres from London's Luton airport. Inscentinel is training unusual warriors – sniffer bees. Their coach is Mathilde Briens, a bee researcher from Normandy, France. Bees have a very special ability that makes them perfect for work like this she explains: "They are able to detect really low concentrations in a massive background of smells in nature. So we can use this olfactory ability, they are really sensitive."

Life is pretty good for the bees in the institute. There is always plenty of food for them: pollen. And in summer, they're allowed outside. They're on duty for two days at the most – and then they're free for the rest of their lives. Mathilde Briens uses a vacuum cleaner to collect small group of bees for a new training session. The bees are to learn how to recognise the common explosive, TNT. TNT does have a smell, but it does not promise the reward of sweet nectar to eat. So bees usually ignore odours like this – but they can be outwitted.

This might look rather cruel, but the special tweezers cannot squash them. They have to be immobilised for the training session – and this doesn't harm them either. If they're too hungry, they become weak and inactive. And they shouldn't be too well-fed or they won't want to learn. But they are hungry now, and ready for some new smell experiences. So they'll be willing to learn.

During the training session, a bee is placed at the end of a glass tube. Air is blown through tube – some molecules of TNT are included in the air current. Now everything is ready for the explosives training. As soon as the smell of the TNT reaches the bees, they're given some sugar water – as a nectar substitute. The bees associate the TNT smell with the information that there is something to eat here. From now on, just the smell of the explosive will give a promise of food. Now the antiterrorist unit is ready for action.

Mathilde runs a test to see whether the cadets have learnt enough from the training session. When they smell TNT, they stick out their long tongues, even if there's no nectar. After only three sessions, they have learnt to smell TNT – this result is much better than with any robot. This ability is no coincidence, Mathilde Briens says: "In nature, the bees actually learn smells, because what they do is they associate the smell of flowers with the nectar they find in those flowers. So they do that every day. And when there is no more nectar in the flowers, they will forget this smell and learn another one. So they use this learning ability every day in their life."

The researchers make use of this learned reflex. In another experiment, three trained bees are fitted with belts. Their task is just to smell, they're not supposed to fly around. A miniature camera in the box records the bees' reactions and shows the movements of their tongues on a screen. The computer records every time they smell the explosive and stick out their tongues. And the reverse experiment works as well – no smell, no reaction.

But for Mathilde Briens the three bees are only the beginning: "So for the detection, we use not only one bee, but several bees. We want to have statistical reliability and the bees are really cheap to produce. You can have hundreds of bees and they are really small as well, so in the machine you can fit lots of bees. So we have better reliability. And the other thing is, we can use a small group of bees for one compound and another group of bees for another compound, so you can have multiple detection in one box at the same time." The US military and large security firms have shown interest in the bees for security screening purposes.