Chemical & Engineering News just published a fascinating 
piece about how ants let other ants know whether they are dead or not.
Of course, the whole piece starts off with a reference to Monty Python's great "I'm not dead yet" scene from the Holy Grail. It's good to see yet another connection between Monty Python and Chromatography!
Here's an excerpt from the article:
By using thin-layer chromatography and gas chromatography to compare live, just-killed, and dead ants, the team showed that a subset of chemicals disappeared from the ants’ outer covering within one hour of death. From those extracts they identified two rapidly dissipating "do not discard" signaling chemicals—specific isomers of the natural products dolichodial and iridomyrmecin.
Click Here to read more and view the video.
It's official!
As part of Analtech's ongoing efforts to conserve energy and reduce our carbon footprint, we will start working four-day weeks in May!
This means a change in hours for us (10 hours a day for four days instead of 8 hours a day for five days) - but we don't forsee any changes in the quality or timeliness of delivery for our customers.
What we do see is one less day a week for employees to commute to work and one less day of running heating/air conditioning.
The men and women here are pretty excited about the move - for us it means one more day a week to spend with our friends and family.
What about you? What is your company doing to conserve energy?