Science news in brief, September 29, 2013

Scientists trying to understand why wood-eating termites are so resistant to extermination have come up with a repugnant explanation. Termites' practice of building nests out from their faeces creates a scatological force field that Florida scientists now believe is the reason biological controls have failed to stop their pestilential march. A nine-year study concluded that termite faeces act as a natural antibiotic, growing good bacteria in the nests that attack otherwise deadly pathogens, according to findings published this month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "Over the millions of years of evolution, termites somehow evolved to take advantage of their poop," said University of Florida's Nanyao Su, the study's lead scientist. Reuters

A robot that picks ripe strawberries as the farmer sleeps was unveiled in Japan on Wednesday, with its developer saying it could cut workloads by two-thirds. The device, which can gather a fruit every eight seconds, uses cameras to determine which strawberries are ripe before snipping them into its basket. The two-metre robot moves on rails between rows of strawberries, usually grown in elevated planters in greenhouses in Japan. It "calculates the degree of ripeness from the colour of the strawberry, which it observes with two digital cameras", said Mitsutaka Kurita, an official of Shibuya Seiki, the company which developed the machine. AFP