Surprise: alchohol is bad

Bad news for booze: U. S. researchers using a rat model have found that alcohol consumption not only kills brain cells, but decreases the life span of new ones.

Using a catheter, alcohol was pumped into rats’ stomachs for four days.

During the treatment, the concentration of booze in the animals’ blood was about equal to that found in human chronic alcoholics.

Control animals, who had received only sugar water, sprouted 2500 new brain cells during the treatment course. But the rats that were ripped to the tits only managed to eke out a little more than half that number.

When the rats were examined one month after the experiment, animals on the alcohol diet had lost almost half of the new brain cells they made during the experiment while the teetotallers managed to keep them all.

ANTagonism

Most scientists agree that many genes work in concert to regulate behaviour—there’s no one specific gene that makes a person angry or depressed, for example. But researchers at the University of Georgia have found a single gene that controls behaviour in a very specific way—in ants.

Fire ants live in two different types of communities. In monogyne colonies, only one queen is allowed and her subjects will kill ants from other colonies who try to muscle in on her turf. In polygyne colonies, hundreds of queens live in harmony and new ones are always welcome.

The difference is chalked up to the Gp-9 gene, which makes a protein that recognises pheromones. Ants living in monogyne societies possess functional copies of Gp-9 while their more tolerant relatives have a defective version.

This means that ants with the functional protein can readily detect pheromone signals from invading queens and drive them out. But ants with the defect can’t tell a queen from a quarter, meaning outsiders can slip in undetected.

AMAZING SCIENCE FACT!

I don’t actually know if this is a fact or not, but a highly respected scientist once told me that the average adult has five pounds of bacteria living in his or her intestines. Is that insane or what? Five pounds! In your ass! Think about it.