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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."
"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
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?
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Or did they get the wine snob genes from PETA activists? Hmmm......
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The title definitely sounds like an Onion article
... of an IgNobel prize. Maybe two: Chemistry and Biology.
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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...
Additionally it prooves that differnt alcoholic drinks have different aromas.
So nothing new at all.
IMHO wine snob would have been right if they taught mice to prefer _expensive_ wines
bickerdyke
If I were to guess, its for the war on terror and the war on drugs.
Most people don't realize that if we were serious about either, you wouldn't see dogs at airports and in the back of squad cars. In fact, you would see pigs. Pigs are more easily trained, have a better sense of smell, and have been proven to do the job equally, if not better. Pigs are also thought to be smarter than dogs and as such, learn faster; which in turn drives down training costs.
Along these lines, which brings us full circle, I recently saw a blurb on the news specifically talking about small rodents being used to sniff luggage at airports.
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.
The chemicals in wine might be different to the ones that mice have evolved to distinguish through natural exposure.
So the fact that they can learn a new domain, for want of a better word, could be new.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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."
Pigs are more easily trained, have a better sense of smell, and have been proven to do the job equally, if not better. Pigs are also thought to be smarter than dogs and as such, learn faster; which in turn drives down training costs.
Besides, Muslim extremists hate pigs so much they wouldn't want to fly if that meant being smelled by a pig.
[11:40am] Mousey Are you a wine snob? :P
11:40AM no, i'm a beer snob
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I was hoping they implanted some DNA from Robert Parker and gave it a typewriter...
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Great... Like there's not enough wine snobs.
Extremists - any sort of extremists - don't care. They're going to heaven anyway, no matter what they do, and everyone else is going to hell. This is why Christian extremists violate the golden rule and Muslim extremists frequent strip clubs and consume alcohol. They believe they already are on the bullet train to Paradise, so it won't matter if they eat some pork.
The faithful that obey every stricture and commandment are the same ones that obey "You shall not kill."
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Just fyi, I'm not sure why this was modded funny. The post is serious. Pigs are very trainable, are on average smarter than dogs, and have a better sense of smell. Not to mention, rodents are being trained and studied to sniff luggage at airports.
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.
.... Wizards Turn Wine Snobs Into Mice.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Now, if only they could turn wine snobs into mice...
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 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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Okay, that may not live up to human standards for a wine snob, but come on, it's a mouse. By mouse standards, that's highly discriminating.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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
Right. Because in point of fact, wine snobs can't do so:
You're better off with the trained mice.
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The big payoff will come when the scientists take the next step and figure out how to turn wine snobs into mice.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
They're the ultimate snobs now.
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
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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-
In fact, the most important is the amount of green stuff.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
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