Sexually Rejected Flies Turn To Booze 95
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."
Was it unexpected? (Score:5, Funny)
I guess if I were a sexually-deprived fly I would be drinking too... just like I do as a sexually-deprived basement dweller
Re:Was it unexpected? (Score:5, Funny)
Winos don't get laid often (Score:2)
That's a fact everybody already knew
I mean, who wants to hit the sack with a drunk?
Re:Winos don't get laid often (Score:5, Funny)
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Clearly you went to all the wrong parties in college.
Damn I miss being that age....
Time flies like an arrow (Score:2)
Fruit flies like a bananna?
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That's correct. Time's passage is altered by gravity, much like an arrow.
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There may be something to this. It has been said that time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana...
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With such a short life even I would turn to booze.
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He's not drinking as compensation. (Score:5, Funny)
It's just to make the un-attractive fruit flies around look better.
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Have you ever seen a fruit fly? Up close? If I was rejected by something that fugly, I'd hit the booze too!
There's a Reason (Score:5, Funny)
And if that doesn't work... (Score:5, Funny)
...do the flies give up and turn to World of Warcraft?
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Probably, but they didn't test for that.
Re:There's a Reason (Score:5, Funny)
Speak for yourself. I have never needed alcohol in order to approach a female fly.
Time flies like an arrow... (Score:5, Funny)
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Are you in knowledge or posession of such time flies? I guess there will be "Producido en Espana" on the ... bottle?
Also, does the arrow they allegedly 'like' have some connection with the time travel implied?
(Posting anonymously for obvious security reasons.)
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Sure, flies can be drunks... but chiggers can't be boozers. :)
Re:Like a bottle of booze. (Score:2)
Wait, so Fruit Flies are Liking Jack Daniels on Flybook?! No wonder Zynga is doing well with Flyville.
Sexually Rejected 'FILES"? (Score:2, Funny)
Must be a Gnome3/Gnome Shell problem ;-)
And when their drinking buddies reject them... (Score:1)
...they turn to Slashdot.
What about... (Score:1)
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Well, there's a spider that bribes the female with food. I guess you could consider that athropostitution?
An article not to be missed! (Score:5, Funny)
Uh... oh... hi honey! Oh no, I only read ScienceMag for the articles... !
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I gotta admit, I saw that *cough* fly girl in the middle with the wings of a moth and the back of a Bayonetta [flickr.com], and I was like "DAT ASS."
Re:An article not to be missed! (Score:4, Informative)
I gotta admit, I saw that *cough* fly girl in the middle with the wings of a moth and the back of a Bayonetta, and I was like "DAT ASS."
Indeed, there seems to be a thing going with scientists and flies' bootylicious backsides [theregister.co.uk] :-O
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Aw yeah that fly gettin' some B-)
Hit that juicy abdomen, fly man! :D
Not surprising (Score:5, Funny)
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Great... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Another scientific reason for women to say we arw the lowest form of life
If you get into that kind of discussion with women and are serious about it, you have problems.
In related news ... (Score:5, Funny)
I misread the title and was REALLY confused... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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I am so glad I was not alone in reading "files"
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I made the same mistake. I really don't think it's so much of a dyslexic moment as much as it is that you probably see the word "files" on a regular basis and so your brain is more likely to initially think that word when you're quickly skimming headlines. There's also a general lack of context until you get down to the bit about fruit flies, that unless you're reading very slowly, and deliberately, it's not a difficult mistake to make. There are plenty of interesting examples that illustrate how our brain
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I too was all like: "what the fuck is a sexually rejected FILE?"
I need a new career.
Re:I misread the title and was REALLY confused... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, remember
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Not actually determining the order of "e, i, l" is probably common in humans reading this title, so some people will just pick "files" since it fits all the data they've gathered at a glance. Also, "i" and "l" are so close that the two alternatives are hard to distinguish, leading to more errors. Neither of these issues falls under the term dyslexia. While it's common to call letter transpositions dyslexia, the term actually means something quite different. It roughly translates to "difficulty with words" and generally denotes difficulty reading caused by neurological problems (as opposed to, say, poor instruction). Just to fight social stigma, I should mention that dyslexia is essentially uncorrelated with intelligence--dyslexics tend to read more slowly and have trouble spelling, but they're not on average either smarter or stupider.
[Note: I'm not sure if the quote above is actually supported by academic research, though there's clearly at least some truth to it. snopes [snopes.com] isn't sure either. Really one should ask a linguist.]
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Plus, most people here have a predisposition to computer files on the mind and not flies.
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My god you are one sick bastard (Score:2)
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.
I must be a fly... (Score:2)
...because I would have produced the same test result.
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Are you a fly, dreaming you are a man, or a man, dreaming you are a fly?
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I'd have trouble telling if the female flies had rejected me or not.
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Stupid flies (Score:3, Funny)
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One's man boring data is another man's life passion.
We have different interests. Go figure!
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
New data, new hypothesis (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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I prefer "mothers against kinetically endured lasting overly virulent embargos of sexually oriented obscene nature"
Commonly referred to as MAKE LOVE SOON ...
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Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
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?
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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...
I know there's ... (Score:1)
Troy Zars of the University of Missouri (Score:1)
your tax dollars at work people, wonder how much grant money that cost us
Those Were The Days (Score:2)
Now look what you did (Score:1)
But what about... (Score:2)
Women Cause Lots Of Societal Issues (Score:1)
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. T
Now I know (Score:2)