Bee plus TechBanditry!

Greetings again fellow Bandits! We’ve got another live Friday TechBandits session planned for 11am EDT!

https://www.twitch.tv/techbanditry

Our crack team of TechBandit researchers at work!

Quite a hodgepodge of Science, Technology, Engineering Arts and Math today… and I’m going to start for the story that should probably be kept until GameBandits next week… but the news waits for no nerd… and everyone loves a good drama…so:

Epic VS. Apple

Fortnite’s Epic Games really resented Apple taking their 30 per cent cut on the billions of dollars Epic makes on their in-game currency, Fortnite’s Vbucks. So they knocked 20 percent off every purchase made directly through Epic instead of the “easier” sale through apple. The thing is, Apple’s contract says that they get 30% from each and every sale via it’s apple store, which is pretty much the ONLY way of getting a game or app onto apple’s iphones and ipads…and so they pulled Fortnite completely from their App Store for breach of contract! But the drama doesn’t end there! Epic then sues Apple for anti-competitive behaviour and makes a video mocking Apple with it’s own famous 1984 commercial! Check this out!

Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite

Which is obviously taking a jab at this old Apple classic!

1984 Apple Commercial

If you want all the gorey details The Verge has a great article about it all:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21366438/apple-fortnite-ios-app-store-violations-epic-payments

Trash

Whew! Now that breaking news is sorted we can turn our attention back to things closer to home… like our garbage trucks!

Toronto trash fuelling Trash Collection!

I had no idea that we were doing this… but it’s such a simple idea and I love it! Using the methane given off by garbage to fuel the garbage trucks that pick it up… so of course I did a little digging and found a little more about how Toronto is using Biogas plants to keep things green:

Toronto is the gas!

You can even do the same thing yourself on a smaller scale with your own food scraps…and you’ll get free cooking gas and liquid fertilizer in return!

Personal Bioplant!

While we’ve been enjoying our summer days, it seems scientists have been comparing our artic to surface of Mars and coming up with some new ice!

By comparing the red planet to the Canadian Arctic scientists now believe that there was never a moister, warmer, river covered early Mars… only sheets of martian ice!

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200803120154.htm

And speaking of martians… how you like this alien-looking deep sea beastie showing up in your fishing nets!? It seems that the tiny isopods in shallow water have a deep sea cousin… and a much bigger cousin at that!

Giant deep sea isopod

https://www.futurity.org/deep-sea-giant-isopod-bathynomus-raksasa-2422042/

And finally we see how hard it is to be a bee… especially these days!

There’s a lot of things out to get bees… everything from pollution, pesticides, global warming, disease and now these horrid looking Varroa Destructor mites that can infest a hive and can lead to complete colony collapse!

An adult female of Varroa destructor, a mite parasiting the honney bee (Apis mellifica). Frontal view, on the head of a bee nymph. Scale : mite width ~ 2 mm Technical settings : – focus stack of 32 images – microscope objective (Nikon achromatic 10x 160/0.25) on 100 mm extension tubes + adapter

Few can explain things as well as the fine folks at Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell… so I’ll let them tell you all about the death of bees!

The Death Of Bees

Without bees, we’re in big trouble! Now, obviously it would be much better if we could keep them around, but we’re already looking at ways that we can automate all the pollinating that they do… including robot bees! (see, I always have to get a robot or two in here!)

Tiny flying robot bees are being built to pollinate crops

But recreating our fabulous flying bees is complicated, let alone having them perform the actual transfer of pollen needed to keep our crops growing ! Which is where bubble blowing drones come in!

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/drone-delivered-soap-bubbles-could-help-pollinate-flowers

And finally for no other reason than I love it… here’s Monty Python being brilliantly ridiculous and then singing their “Eric the Half-a-Bee” song!

Eric the Half A Bee

See you all at 11am!

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