Britney Spears is now in Nature?? Wow! Also - how would you like your cocktail topped up with arsenic?

It's the second day of work. And I have been good. I have been reading papers. And i have found some pretty cool things, that I thought I would share.

First: I found a paper talking about Britney Spears from Nature (the high-end science journal). And yes, the same blond pop-singer Britney. I couldn't believe my eyes.
It's by Vince LiCata, titled "When Britney Spears comes to my lab" (Nature 451, 106, 2008)
He's a prof at the Louisiana State University , and he talks how Britney will come to his lab, and how he will teach her, and then how she will love science and change the world, as people would believe in her. Some sort of crazy story. In Nature!!!

Second: I found this cool paper about flies and booze, and how male flies become sex-crazy after consuming lots of alcohol (Heidi Ledford, " Drunken flies get hypersexual". Nature News 3 January 2008).

In the flies, hypersexuality caused by chronic alcohol exposure has the effect of making the males chase anything with wings — other males included.
Here are some quotes from this news:

"As the concentration of ethanol in the body rises, flies begin to become uncoordinated and oblivious to their surroundings: they get tipsy. “They bump into each other. They bump into the walls.” Add more alcohol and the flies become sedated. Add still more and the soused flies die. Remarkably, even the concentrations of ethanol that induce these behaviours are nearly the same in flies and humans, says Heberlein. Flies also develop a tolerance to alcohol, and can develop withdrawal-like symptoms."

"The researchers noted that male flies repeatedly exposed to ethanol vapour became less discriminate in their mate selection. The buzzed flies often courted fellow males, pursuing them around the cage while serenading with a traditional fruitfly courtship song played on vibrating wings. Eventually, the lusty flies devolve into a courting frenzy. “You get a chain of males chasing each other,” says Heberlein, who was not associated with the study but has observed similar behaviour in her own unpublished work. In contrast, alcohol had little effect on mating in female fruitflies, which normally do not court their mates."
"Although the drunken dipterans were more amorous, their rates of successful copulation declined after getting tipsy, the researchers found — a trend that has long been observed in humans."

Interesting, eh?

The third paper was about poison (Philip Hunter, A toxic brew we cannot live without. Micronutrients give insights into the interplay between geochemistry and evolutionary biology. EMBO reports 9, 1, 15–18 (2008). Apparently, a physician, alchemist and astrologer Paracelsus (1493–1541) once said, "all things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous."

And in this paper they claim, that actually lead, mercury, and even arsenic are used by humans and other organisms. Furthermore, some of these "known to be deadly toxic" compounds are crucial for life. Nice to know.
So now, accept this drink with arsenic in it - they are only trying to look after your health.