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Researchers Turn Mice Into Wine Snobs
Unsatisfied with the number of reasons people have to hate rodents already, scientists at Japan's Hiroshima University have taught mice to be wine snobs. After being trained to pick red wine over other kinds the mice were taught to distinguish between brands. From the article: "We examined performance of mice in discrimination of liquor odors by Y-maze behavioral assays. Thirsty mice were initially trained to choose the odor of a red wine in the Y-maze. After successful training (>70% concordance for each trained mouse), the individual mice were able to discriminate the learned red wine from other liquors, including white wine, rosé wine, sake, and plum liqueur."
Animals use scent to find and remember pathways to food, mates, avoid predators, etc. For a scavenger like a mouse, it should be no surprise that they can use a particular scent to locate something, and then in the future associate that particular scent with where they have been successful in the past. I nominate these guys for an Ig Nobel.
"My name is Mickey Mouse, and I'm an alcoholic."
Fruity, with a dash of buck-toothed pretentious asshole. Yes, yes, a wonderful vintage indeed.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Not only that but the proximity of the olfactory bulbs to the amygdala allows the pairing of scent with emotion and reward learning to be very effective.
Researchers turn mice into winos
Fixed that for them.
Get a web developer
What is this sort of research good for?
Really, I'm curious. All it seems to prove is that yes, mice have a sense of smell, and they can use it to smell things and distinguish between different smells. Don't tell me we didn't know that before.
I'm concerned by this, too, because in the end, mice are still animals. I'm not against experimenting on animals if it's necessary and if there's no alternatives, e.g. for drug tests, but what does this accomplish? The mice are suffering for no good reason. (And yes, as lab animals, they are suffering. Again, this can be justified in other cases, but what is the justification here?)
of Mickey Mouse research?
How much did we spend on this?
It depends.
Are you Japanese? If not, then "we" spent nothing on this.
If you are, then a lot of it depends on how the study was funded, and why it was performed. TFA is not very informative on that point.
Was this a grad student project that a few grad students needed to get some lab time under their belts, or a government-funded study? If it's a grad student study, then the expected result of the study was to spend a few dozen hours in the lab (the presence of alcohol probably made the boredom of the study more manageable) and get a passing grade on a research report. That there was any interesting science that emerged from a student's work is purely coincidental. If there's a use for this behavioral information, it would be a bonus.
Not every grad project is going to cure cancer, or even set out to cure it.
If this is a government-funded study, there may (or may not) be a larger goal at work. Perhaps it was a cheap way to see how sensitively mice could discern chemical scent patterns, without actually asking the scientists to work with Sarin ingredients or explosives? Maybe the school administration was doing a mouse study to pattern the behavior of undergrad students when they learn alcohol is in the building?
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Or did they get the wine snob genes from PETA activists? Hmmm......
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there *Fixed* the subject for ya...
The title definitely sounds like an Onion article
... of an IgNobel prize. Maybe two: Chemistry and Biology.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
So what are you up to, professor number 1? "Oh, I'm cooking up some cold fusion, in my basement." And you, professor number 2? "Oh, I'm making gasoline from algae." Now to professor number 3, what is your area of research? "I'm training mice to become wine connoisseurs. Hey, don't laugh, my mice gave a Château Mouton Rothschild five squeaks!"
So the next time that I'm in a expensive restaurant, and they ask if I want to look at the wine menu, I'll just pull a mouse out of my pocket. And say, "My expert here, will just take a quick scamper through your wine cellar, and find the best wine."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
How do we know the mice weren't tricking the researchers into thinking they (the mice) weren't wine snobs already?
The Universe is neither friendly nor hostile; it is merely absurd. This story's set-up for a thousand wiseacre Slashdot comments is yet more proof that Adams was on the right track, after all.
wine snobs are turned into mice.
I, for one, welcome our new snob overlords.
Wine is supposed to be a good accompaniment to cheese, after all...
I am Japanese, you insensitive crod!
Still no cure for cancer.
Hipster mice! With tiny hoodies, dark framed glasses, and Starbucks cups!
Still more evidence that I'm in the wrong line of work...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
But mice do not really seek cheese. I have kept both mice and rats as pets and they far prefer nuts and breads to cheese. If you want to trap mice peanut butter is really the best bait, as it sticks to the trap and they love it.
Wasn't there some research a while back about training mice to sniff out explosives? I'm guessing it never went anywhere because people don't like the idea of a swarm of mice crawling over their luggage every time they fly.
people don't like the idea of a swarm of mice crawling over their luggage every time they fly.
I'm sure they'll like the idea of a swarm of mice crawling over their table when they dine even less...
Lucky they didn't train them to use Macs. The Japanese are sadistic bastards who eat dolphins alive but that would be going too far even for them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...I've ever eaten. On the shinkansen going to Hiroshima, the snack cart had some regional flavors. So I decided to try Hiroshima Wine Pocky.
It was, coincidentally, like chewing on rat poison.
[11:40am] Mousey Are you a wine snob? :P
11:40AM no, i'm a beer snob
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I was hoping they implanted some DNA from Robert Parker and gave it a typewriter...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Great... Like there's not enough wine snobs.
Hey Wing... how can we get a good supply of nice wine and other alcoholic drinks? I don't know, Yoshi, I can't even afford enough wine to get my pet mouse Meeka drunk! Your mouse drinks wine?! Well, yeah, the last bottle I had, I fed him a teaspoon of it. He got all happy and started bumping into things, so I didn't give him any more. Think he'd do it again? He likely would, yeah. Cool, lets get the school to buy a bunch of booze...I mean wine and other stuff... Meeka can have his teaspoon full from each bottle, and we can have the rest. :)
Weirdly, scientists also found that the mice showed a group affinity toward various products made by Apple like the iPad and iPhone. Even stranger, many of the mice started wearing little black turtleneck shirts in their cages.
is someone who can differentiate white, rose, and red wine.
My, oh my.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Grad students for all practical purposes live in the laboratory...if you want to call that living anyway. At a moderate rate of 60 hours a week your lab hours count will be off by a couple orders of magnitude after the 6-7 years it takes to earn a Ph.D. Even if you intended to write "undergrads" you'd be giving them short shrift. Of the dozen or so undergrad lab mates I've had in the last 15 years the majority worked for several years in the same lab and were funded under one of the professor's grants. That's far more than a few dozen hours which even the laziest undergrad I've worked with accomplished inside of two months. Hell I've worked with four high school students through an apprenticeship program and three had over 500 hours in by the time their stint in the program was over.
However as you point out TFA is not informative as to the point of the study and how it was funded. Having had some small experience with research being reported by the media the odds are pretty good that the reporter and/or editor mangled the point of the research quite badly and if one wants to know why mice were being trained to distinguish wine you'd need to read the original research paper published in Chemical Senses. The last paragraph of the introduction of scientific paper usually tells you why the researchers are doing their thing, and quoting that paragraph:
"Most naturally occurring odors are complex blends of volatile compounds. The way in which they are perceived depends upon the interactions between mixture components at the level of olfactory receptors (Derby 2000) as well as the way that component signals are processed in the olfactory bulb and olfactory cortex (Wilson and Stevenson 2003; Tabor et al. 2004). Because most of these inputs are irrelevant at any given moment, it should be more efficient to focus neural resources on a subset of the available information and ignore the rest (Luck 1998). However, to our knowledge, few papers have reported experimental evidence for selective attention in odor discrimination. In the present paper, we report behavioral evidence for selective attention in odor discrimination of mice. We found this evidence in the course of behavioral studies on the discrimination of liquor odors in mice using a Y-maze. Our initial interest was to assess if mice could discriminate different brands of liquors just by taking a sniff of them like an expert flavorist. Additionally, we also demonstrate that selective attention in the olfactory system of mice could be modified through their learning experiences."
Now as for how important and novel this is, it was published in 2008 and according to google scholar has been cited by other papers four times since. It's definitely not a huge paper but neither is it an embarrassment. If you've been doing science for more than 10 years chances are pretty good you'll have a paper with as low a citation rate as this.
As for weirdness, it pales compared to this: homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks. You can get the Ig Nobel-winning research paper here, complete with pictures of the deed. If you really want to.
This could have been done very cheaply. Just leave their cages sitting in a room with the movie Sideways playing on auto-repeat.
Yes, but have they have trained to believe that wine tastes better from a thin glass?
.... Wizards Turn Wine Snobs Into Mice.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Now, if only they could turn wine snobs into mice...
1.Train mice to smell the good stuff
2. Sell the mice
3. Profit.
Or the more obvious option: The mice are merely extensions into our universe of supremely intelligent pan-dimensional beings. They wanted to get loaded and trained grad students to put booze in their mazes. Simples.
I wonder how many crates of French Grand cru wines that they spend on this project.
I wonder if they could be trained to be wine slobs too. Then they could compare the two and find out if slobs or snobs are healthier.
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I bet a human with no experience in wines could easily tell red wine and sake apart- their odor is completely different. One is made from grapes and the other made from rice!
Yes, I would be impressed if the mice could differentiate between two competing brands, say a Merlot from competing wineries...
love is just extroverted narcissism
They're the ultimate snobs now.
Don't tell them a rat is the chef.
I don't think mice are smart enough for that sort of business. Rats, on the other hand, been trained to sniff out land mines, and even TB.
bbc story
mines
Sent from my PDP-11
the individual mice were able to discriminate the learned red wine from other liquors, including white wine, rosé wine, sake, and plum liqueur
But still can't tell the difference between Diet Dr. Pepper and regular Dr. Pepper.
This is just proving that mice can smell. Anyone that deals with mice can tell them that, and without a research grant as well. Next they should prove that dogs can identify burrito eaters from their intestinal gaseous excretion.
people don't like the idea of a swarm of mice crawling over their luggage every time they fly.
I'm sure they'll like the idea of a swarm of mice crawling over their table when they dine even less...
Waiter, this mouse is corked.
Would have been a much more interesting article
I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar...
-Lucy-
It's just a sample size of...one, but cheese tended to induce a sort of amok in my rat. Not sure how its rarity (dairy products are supposedly a bit unhealthy to rodents after all) influenced the reaction.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Too bad not as far as with our perception of value / pleasure / money involved...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Thank SCIENCE! we finally know the answer to that question. Research money well spent.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I can tell the difference between two wines. That doesn't mean that one of those wines is 'better' than the other.
The mice have not been trained to be wine snobs. In order to do that the mice would have to insist that one wine was special, that it was worth dying for, and that it was well worth the $3000 price tag. They would also have to adopt a thoughtful expression while drinking and learn to raise an eyebrow when some other mouse claimed that there was no difference. There is a lot to being a wine snob beyond merely being aware of a difference. Being able to tell the difference requires sensitivity and judgement. Being a wine snob requires acting skills and low self esteem.
No mouse is that stupid.
I can see a lot of potential for a cheese and wine party though.
Who knew?
the other way around.