The tiny bees have again presented us with delicious and exotic gifts of the hive.

In the first ever issue of the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal (ISMEJ), scientists from Bar-Ilan University have shown that honey and royal jelly (a nutritive mixture fed to larval honey bees) can be effective defenses against the anti-biotic resistant microbe P. aeruginosa.

The defensive properties of honey and royal jelly are the result of two of their ingredients: fructose and mannosylated glycoproteins. Together these molecules act as decoys of host cell-surface compounds that the microbe uses to attach itself to its victims.

Although P. aeruginosa generally only affects people with compromised immune systems, don't let that discourage you from slathering all your future open wounds with ample amounts of bee-secretions!

As an aside, a fructose is tasty and easy to draw, and a mannosylated glycoprotein is not tasty and hard to draw.

Many first year students, scientists especially, succumb to party peer pressure and fail or drop out of their programs before the subject matter gets really juicy. More specifically, when I say "party peer pressure", I mean "drinking peer pressure". But why not take that love of drinking and keep it with science where it belongs? It's so simple: start up a science-themed bar franchise in major academic centers.

Especially with the success of Cafe Scientifique across the globe, the need for an intellectual refuge, away from the blaring racket of top40 hits at clubs and the rowdiness of pubs, is greater than ever. The name of the drinking establishment is really what inspired me in the first place, Dirac's Constant, ħ (pronounced h-bar). Waterloo has a club called Fubar, Guelph has a bar called eBar, so what's one more "consonant"-bar? I'll tell you what it is, an entrepreneurial goldmine.

The gimmicky nature of a science bar could easily get out of control in the wrong hands. Like so:

• Drinks should only be stirred with a magnetic stirrer and come with a guaranteed volume error less than 5%.
  
• Waiters and Waitresses must be familiar with the science of food and drink (and should be tipped accordingly!)
• I'm sure Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics would be honored to have her physics cocktails served (scroll down on the left sidebar)
• Drinks must be served in laboratory glassware of all shapes and sizes ("I'll have a rum and coke, yep my usual, in a Burette please")
• Walls would be lined with scientific texts (in order to settle drinking bets)

And those are just the first things that came to mind. I admit its a fun concept, but I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. Professional scientists may be more interested in keeping science separate from their leisurely activities. Well, at least I'll know what to try when I fail out of my program!

In this week's Letters to Nature, Max Wolf and colleagues present a plausible model for the evolution of 'personality' in animals. The mechanism they propose links the propensity of an animal to take risks (such as being aggressive or exploring new territory) to its future potential for reproduction. Specifically, the authors theorize that animals who have more to lose (i.e. have a higher probability of successful and/or greater reproduction in the future) will behave in a less risky manner than animals who have little, or nothing to lose.