Slashdot Mirror
Sexually Rejected Flies Turn To Booze
sciencehabit writes "Offer a male fruit fly a choice between food soaked in alcohol and its nonalcoholic equivalent, and his decision will depend on whether he's mated recently or been rejected by a female. Flies that have been given the cold shoulder are more likely to go for the booze, researchers have found. It's the first discovery, in fruit flies, of a social interaction that influences future behavior."
I guess if I were a sexually-deprived fly I would be drinking too... just like I do as a sexually-deprived basement dweller
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
It's just to make the un-attractive fruit flies around look better.
Probably like most /. readers, he needs the alcohol to get up the nerve to approach the female fly.
... fruit flies like a bottle of booze.
Just saying.
Must be a Gnome3/Gnome Shell problem ;-)
...they turn to Slashdot.
What about hooker flies? Another study, I suppose.
Nerdy fly fetishes of the world, your time is now! The fly on fly doggy style action shot is just...
::notices the wife unit enter the room::
Uh... oh... hi honey! Oh no, I only read ScienceMag for the articles... !
...do the flies give up and turn to World of Warcraft?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It must suck to be sexually rejected AND lack hands.
Another scientific reason for women to say we arw the lowest form of life and reject us. Pepe Lopez, here I come.
Silence is a state of mime.
Have gnu, will travel.
I read it as "Sexually Rejected Files Turn To Booze". I was completely confounded for a moment until I expanded the summary, and saw the words "male fruit fly", which I read correctly.
Bizarre.... I don't typically have dyslexic moments.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Of course I'm talking about "bar flies".
That's a fact everybody already knew
I mean, who wants to hit the sack with a drunk?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...because I would have produced the same test result.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
How'd they make bottles small enough for the flies to hold on to?
This is only because the flies don't know how to give the alcohol soaked food to the female flies first.
One's man boring data is another man's life passion.
We have different interests. Go figure!
people die, yet we study the drinking habits of fruit-fly
There are over 75,000 alcohol related deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Is that enough to warrant some research?
...on those 75000 deaths? Yes.
There are over 75,000 alcohol related deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Is that enough to warrant some research?
Maybe a significant number of those deaths were actually sexual-rejection-related deaths after all. Mothers Against Sexual Rejection, anyone?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
... a wingman joke in here somehwere.....
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.--Mark Twain
no, we already know depressed people turn to drink. we already know how and why ODing on booze can kill. we already know why and how drunken sots are dangerous to self and others. no research needed.
Say every single person had their education prepare them for their coming life as an R&D engineer focused on improving the lightbulb. How much faster do you think lightbulb technology would advance with 5 billion adults actively working on improving the lightbulb, compared with, say, 1000? How much would society lose in other areas by having these people devote their lives to improving the lightbulb, which 99% of them couldn't give a shit about, rather than other areas or other work?
Concurrent advancements in technology and civilization. Learn about it, please.
Fruit flies like a bananna?
No brain, no pain.
your tax dollars at work people, wonder how much grant money that cost us
...when I was Lord of Flies
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
people starve, people die, yet we study the drinking habits of fruit-fly, OFFS!
And you post on slashdot. Who is wasting more time? Go save some starving people.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Actually shortly after its release the IEC put engineers world-wide into a race to decrease the life of the light-bulb. A product that lasts is a failure in business.
Except they identified a particular protein that is created in these depressed males that causes them to turn to alcohol. Considering ~50% of fly proteins have homologs in humans, it may be a good target for drugs in the future. Still think it's a useless study?
Apparently the tinfoil hat companies have learned a thing or two about sales from the IEC, judging by your post. (Not to mention, you completely missed the point of the post.)
While you perhaps could have been more eloquent, you have a point. Malnutrition is a terrible problem and needs to be more effectively addressed on an international level. Allowing people fleeing hunger in their home country refugee status in other countries would help, as would more thoughtful subsidy policy, better access to seeds and fertilizers, less social stigma about being poor, and more efficient use of existing resources. To be fair, the number of malnurished people has generally declined over the last several decades as a fraction of world population so something is being done about the problem, but there's still nearly a billion people (yes, three times the population of the US) who suffer from malnutrition each year.
On the other hand, there several arguments in favor of this research:
* One never knows when and where pure research will pay off. Science builds on previous work, so who knows what will become of this? Is it inconceivable that a more effective method of dealing with mosquito-borne malaria might come of this? That's just one possible route to an application out of innumerable ones, most of which I can't conceive of now.
* Many believe knowledge has intrinsic value beyond practical applications. I agree. Stupidity is humanity's single worst plague, and it is fought with both knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. Spreading science--which ideally embodies evidenced-based, rigorous reasoning--by funding scientists fights stupidity effectively (though scientists could stand to be better communicators, on the whole).
* Other branches of academic research have even less hope of achieving applicability. Literary analysis and some corners of math and theoretical physics come to mind. Why pick on this one?
You became a bad example for fruit flies!
It's useful research. If we can get them to booze *before* having sex, we'll have less food spoilage due to fruit fly maggots...
The the surprise is that flies are so similar to humans, not that the phenomena happened .
Such a Freudian slip of the mind shows a diseased mind that is best examined... from 2 km through a sniper scope... I should know... I read it that way too.
You know you are a nerd when your brain tries to relate any sentence with the word sex in it, to computers.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
scientists study fruit-files and other simpler creatures not for fun, but to better understand biology and so to find better cures for human diseases. We are made of the same components as all the other living beings ultimately. Drinking habits is something irrelevant here and obviously not appliable to insects like we intend to humans.
...described as the "Slashdot Effect".
people die, yet we study the drinking habits of fruit-fly
There are over 75,000 alcohol related deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Is that enough to warrant some research?
Is that flies or people?
One of the interesting things I learned from reading Mary Roach's *Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex* (ISBN-13: 978-0393064643) is that it's very difficult for researchers to get funding for research that has anything to do with sex. Scientists resort to stratagems like including "physiology" in study titles, or simply paying for their research out of their own pocket.
You oughtn't have to make a special "applicability" argument to research on sex, given that it is not only an important part of human welfare, it's fundamental to the survival of most life forms on Earth. Anything like that *other* than sex would not be controversial in the least. We don't demand an immediate explanation of why a researcher is interested in anatomy, genetics, nutrition or non-reproductive physiology, but sex research is automatically assumed frivolous until proven otherwise.
Now I wouldn't want to draw too confident a physiological or genetic parallel between Drosophila melanogaster and human behavior. Perhaps we'll find out it is mere coincidence that alcohol plays a special role in Drosophila reproductive behavior (these are *fruit* flies, after all). That it has humorous parallels with human reproductive behavior doesn't negate the scientific value of knowing more about this extremely important research species.
On the other hand, there might be something other than coincidence at work here, and that would be *very* significant.
In either case, our discomfort with our *own* reproductive behavior has no bearing on the scientific value of research like this.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Guess what? A lot of biology research starts with fruit flies.
Wait, so Fruit Flies are Liking Jack Daniels on Flybook?! No wonder Zynga is doing well with Flyville.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
...the equally important discovery that after successfully mating, both flies lie on their backs and smoke cigarettes?
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Its far from politically correct to say these things, but for decades study after study has consistently shown women are the root cause of many of society's woes. Everything from cheating to sexual divients, and even rapests and serial killers frequently share a common factor - hateful rejection by women throughout their teenage years. The fact is, a lot of women simple don't reject, they scornfully spur wouldbe suitors.
Later, many women use sex as a weapon. This is directly equatable to conditional love. Thusly, women who use sex as a weapon in a relationship are actually begging their mate to cheat on them. After all, who doesn't want to feel love and who isn't going to attempt find some. Even though its not technically love, its the closest they will ever find so long as they remain in a relationship with such a horribly broken partner. This is why in most relationships where men cheat, women are literally the cause of said cheating.
I could go on and on - and yes, even for men, excessive drinking is frequently a sign of an unhealthy relationship whereby the women is the root cause.
As I said, none of this is P.C., but that's the facts. The simple truth is, women are literally are large part of many of the worst social problems society has to deal with. And culturally, American women tend to rank up there on the top of problems. Which is also why many other cultures don't experience the same cultural problems America does.
The fact that fruitflies suffer at least one of the same social issues as a result of interaction with females is facinating to say the least.
I can save you even more research money, people will choose booze over your hypothetical protein suppressor.
Yes, you've found the cure for everything: cynicism!
Just what Jr. needs, another daddy fruit fly on the sauce.
Now I know why fruit flies are all over the place when they fly - and also why they are so easy to kill.
http://www.acetonestudio.com