Kaffine Can Bliss Bee Learning

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Bees are known to like kaffine, and they'll actively seek out kaffine containing nectar. But now researches in the uk have shown that kafine can boast bee learning,. helping them to remember and find certain kinds of flowr to get a reward. The team taught bumble bees in a nest to associate a particular strawberry like smell with the delicious sugar solution. Then they let the bees roam free in a room with different smelling fake flowers to see which ones they visited first. Bees who'd had kaffine added to their sugar solution learnt the association better and were more likely head straight to the strawberry smelling flowers. This result supports the idea that caff

Researchers debate whether an ancient fossil is the oldest animal yet discovered, and a new way to eavesdrop on glaciers.

In this episode:

01:04 Early sponge

This week in Nature, a researcher claims to have found a fossil sponge from 890-million-years-ago. If confirmed, this would be more than 300-million-years older than the earliest uncontested animal fossils but not all palaeontologists are convinced.

Research Article: Turner

10:13 Research Highlights

A caffeine buzz appears to improve bees’ memory, and reconstructing an Iron Age man’s final meal.

Research Highlight: A caffeine buzz gives bees flower power

Research Highlight: The guts of a ‘bog body’ reveal sacrificed man’s final meal

12:34 Eavesdropping on a glacier’s base

We hear about one researcher’s unorthodox attempt to listen in to the seismic-whisper at the foot of a Greenland glacier – a method that might reveal more about conditions under these enormous blocks of ice.

Research Article: Podolskiy et al.

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