Word: queen
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...sexual environment does sometimes loosen up in ant colonies. While the place may never become a Caligulan free-for-all, collective breeding will resume if the queen dies or is experimentally removed - but only until a new queen establishes herself and the reproductive lockdown resumes...
...colonies have good reason to be abstemious places. When you're trying to hold together so complex a society without - let's face it - a lot of brainpower, you want a population made up of the fittest individuals you can get. A queen that has the genetic mettle to crank out lots of good eggs that produce lots of good babies doesn't need any competition from other, lesser females setting up a nest nearby. Even the queen herself is not allowed to fool with the gene pool once it's been set. She mates only once in her life...
Earlier studies had shown that a queen that senses potential competition from another fertile female will chemically mark the pretender; that female will then be attacked by lower-ranking females. Biologists Jürgen Liebig and Adrian Smith of Arizona State University suspected that something similar might go on even without the queen's intervention and believed the answer might lie in scent chemicals called cuticular hydrocarbons...
...Mark Twain declared. Though the boom was partly lit by the cigar's affordability, they soon become a must-have accessory for debonair gentlemen - men like King Edward VII, who, upon assuming the British throne in 1901, famously announced a break with the smoke-free policies of his mother Queen Victoria by uttering the words: "Gentlemen, you may smoke." Ulysses S. Grant's cigar habit proved his undoing, saddling him with the throat cancer that killed him. And Freud was a chimney: Patients on his couch had to endure not only running commentary about their suppressed Oedipal complexes...
...remains to be seen how deep the Sinaloan beauty queen was in the pockets of the drug capos. Soldiers made the bust in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara after a tip-off from an informant. They stopped Zuniga and the seven men as they cruised around town in a pair of bulky SUVs. Police allege the beauty queen's boyfriend, Orlando Garcia Urquiza, who was in the cruiser with her, is a high-ranking member of the Juarez Cartel, which controls smuggling into west Texas. Garcia's brother Ricardo was identified as the cartel's operational commander when...