An international group of electronic music composers is taking beats from the dance club to jungles and forests and back, all to help save nature's greatest singers. A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean is a new album that includes the sounds of endangered birds. The album will come out next month, whose proceeds will go directly towards efforts to save birds.

The whole project was born out of this idea of trying to combine birdsong, electronic music and conservation. A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean was organized by activist, music producer, Robin Perkins. He invited artists from each of the endangered birds 'homelands to build their own songs around the birds’ songs. There are contributions from ten artists in eight different countries.

First single Black Catbird was created by The Garifuna Collective, from Belize. Al Obando, guitarist and producer of the group, always took in national parks and viewed birds when on the road with the band. “There are no trails, and there are no signs there to tell you about what you reseeing,” Obando says. “So we're trying to do something for the birds and nature tourism.”

Another musician who responded to Robin's call is Tamara Montenegro, an artist from Nicaragua. She was shocked to hear of the serious situation of the Guardabarranco after being approached: “This beautiful creature I grew up adoring also faced the influence of the systematic human activities”. In response, she created a song inspired by this bird and the challenges it faces to live naturally.

The new album is the second edition, following on from A Guide to the Birdsong of South America, produced by Robin in 2015. That first album has raised, to date, over $15,000 benefitting conservation projects in South America. As with the first album, all of the money from the sales of the new album will support specific organizations, including Birds Caribbean.

Japan is known to have higher than average rates of stomach cancer. Recently, the town of Kaneyama in Yamagata Prefecture decided to get its 6, 000 residents (居民) tested.

However, the frozen urine samples (尿样) are not tested in conventional ways. Instead, Professor Masao Miyashita and his team are using them in a trial to determine if specially trained cancer-sniffing dogs can accurately detect the disease. Though the study is still in its early stages, Miyashita is thrilled with the results. He said, “In our research so far, cancer detection dogs have been able to find signs of cancer with an accuracy of nearly 100 percent.”

Researchers have known about the animals’ superior sensory skills for decades. However, their ability to detect cancer in humans came to light in 1989, after a dog sniffed out early-stage malignant melanoma (恶性黑色素瘤) on a patient’s leg in London. Since then, scientists from many countries have conducted studies to test dogs’ great skill at identifying cancer chemicals.

While most dogs can be trained for the task, researchers say the best candidates are dogs that are precise, quiet, and perhaps even a little shy. The training process is similar to how dogs are taught to learn any trick — by rewarding them with treats! However, it takes much longer because the dogs have to learn to separate the “cancer scent (气味)” from the thousands of organic compounds (有机化合物) in the human body. Researchers begin by exposing the dogs to urine samples from people with cancer, people with other diseases, and patients with no health issues, Once the dogs are able to accurately identify cancer, they are further trained to detect particular kinds of cancer.

Successful as they may be, experts think dogs are unlikely to replace conventional tests. For one, it takes about seven years and costs as much as $45,000 to train a single dog. Klaus Hackner, a researcher and physician who studies dogs detecting cancer in breath samples at Krems University Hospital in Austria, is also not convinced dogs can be relied upon alone. Patients, therefore, have to receive further tests to confirm if they have the disease.

Bees are unimaginably territorial（地盘意识强的）, fighting to death to defend their home with painful stings (螫刺). But killer bees are particularly fierce. They appeared after African bees were imported to Brazil in the 1950s. By the 1980s, they had spread north to the United States, outgunning native bees along the way. Their massive attacks have killed more than 1,000 people.

Mario Palma, a biochemist at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil, who studies social behavior in bees, wanted to understand the basis of this aggression. So he and his colleagues swung a black leather ball in front of some killer bees and collected the bees whose stingers got stuck in the ball during the attack. They also collected killer bees that remained in the cell. The analysis suggested that killer bee brains have two proteins that—in the aggressive bees—quickly break into pieces to form a so-called “neuropeptide( 神 经 肽 )”, they reported this week in the Journal of Proteome Research.

Palma and his colleagues already knew that bee brains have these two proteins. “We were astonished when we identified some very simple neuropeptides, which were produced in a few seconds,” Palma said. Killer bees that remained in the cell did not make these neuropeptides, he reported. And when his team put these neuropeptides into young, less aggressive bees, they “became aggressive like older individuals”.

Palma added that these neuropeptides also increase the production of energy and alarm chemicals. They could also encourage the nerve cells in killer bees needed to make the stinging attack. “There is a fine biochemical regulation in the killer bee brain,” he said. Researchers have found these neuropeptides in other insects, but few had associated them with “fight” behavior.