Thursday, October 26, 2006

What could it BEE ?

The BEE genome has just been unravelled, and it is hoped to unravel important questions about the intelligent behavior of bees. Bees have brains about 20,000 times less massive than the human brain, yet they are able to recognize faces from black-and-white pictures and even remember them days after training. In contrast, powerful computers still have great difficulty doing that.

So what could it BEE that makes them so good at the task? The clue must lie in the fact that faces, like hands, consist of certain unique patterns. Somehow, bees are able to identify these different patterns, and apparantly, it doesn't take many brain cells to do so.