Carbon Chemist

Tag: drugs and alcohol

  • Hornets can hold their alcohol like no other animal on Earth

    Hornets can hold their alcohol like no other animal on Earth

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    Macrophotograph of a huge Eastern hornet (orientalis Vespa) against a blue sky on a Sunny summer day

    The oriental hornet (Vespa orientalis) could drink you under the table

    Vladimir_Kazachkov/Shutterstock

    A species of hornet that often munches on foods containing alcohol can hold its liquor, without any side effects, at levels that no other known animal can tolerate.

    “This is crazy,” says study author Sofia Bouchebti at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

    The diet of the oriental hornet (Vespa orientalis) consists of nectar and ripe fruits, including grapes. This fruit contains sugar that, when it naturally ferments over time, turns into ethanol.

    While ethanol can be nutritious for animals, it is also highly intoxicating. Even animals that routinely eat fermenting fruits – like fruit flies and tree shrews – cannot stomach more than 4 per cent ethanol in their meals, according to Bouchebti and her colleagues.

    But when Bouchebti’s team gave hornets nothing to eat for a week except a range of sugary solutions containing different quantities of ethanol – between 1 and 80 per cent – the hornets seemed to be completely unaffected. Both their behaviour and lifespan remained unchanged. What makes this particularly surprising is that the solutions with 80 per cent ethanol contain an alcohol content four times as high as anything found in nature.

    “In the beginning, we did the experiment only with 20 per cent [ethanol] and we were already amazed,” says study author Eran Levin at Tel Aviv University in Israel. The 80 per cent ethanol figure is “even harder to believe”.

    Analysis of the genomes of several hornet species suggests the insects have two to four copies of a gene that produces NADP+, which helps break down alcohol. The researchers think this might help explain why the oriental hornet – and possibly other hornet species – can handle such large quantities of alcohol.

    These findings “remind us that we are not alone in our fondness for alcohol”, says James Fry at the University of Rochester in New York. But he isn’t persuaded that hornets are the only organisms that can handle this much alcohol, because data from other animal studies is hard to compare.

    The hornets’ penchant for alcohol might give them a competitive edge when it comes to feeding on highly fermented foods, which are highly nutritious, says Irene Stefanini at the University of Turin in Italy. She thinks the hornets’ tolerance is probably related to the animals’ mutualistic relationship with the fermenting brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which her studies have shown reside, survive and even mate within hornets’ intestines. Maybe the hornets help the yeasts move around from fruit to fruit, while the yeasts help the hornets find energy-rich foods.

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    • insects/
    • drugs and alcohol

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  • Media portrayals peddle a dangerous fiction about substance misuse

    Media portrayals peddle a dangerous fiction about substance misuse

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    Narratives around addiction often reduce it to a series of poor choices, lack of values and weakness. This has real-world consequences, warns Anna Wolfe

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  • Dutch police trial AI-powered robot dog to safely inspect drug labs

    Dutch police trial AI-powered robot dog to safely inspect drug labs

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    Spot robotic dogs have a range of applications

    CTK/Alamy

    Dutch police are planning to use an autonomous robotic dog in drug lab raids to avoid placing officers at risk from criminals, dangerous chemicals and explosions. If tests in mocked-up scenarios go well, the artificial intelligence-powered robot will be deployed in real raids, say police.

    Simon Prins at Politie Nederland, the Dutch police force, has been testing and using robots in criminal investigations for more than two decades, but says they are only now growing capable enough to be practical for more…

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  • Drug residue can be detected in fingerprints left at crime scenes

    Drug residue can be detected in fingerprints left at crime scenes

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    Apr 10, 2024 Researchers have unveiled a groundbreaking method capable of detecting drug substances from fingerprints lifted from crime scenes, which could provide fresh insights into unsolved cases. The technique is sheath-flow probe electrospray ionization. Supplied by Meg Cox M.A.Cox@lboro.ac.uk

    A researcher uses a chemical to extract drug residue from fingerprints

    Loughborough University

    Forensic scientists have developed a new technique that can detect drug and explosive residue on fingerprint samples from crime scenes.

    “That information, the presence of drug particles, is an almost untapped resource,” says James Reynolds at Loughborough University in the UK. That is because investigators use thin gelatine layers, called gel lifters, to lift fingerprints. These introduce chemicals to samples, making it difficult to identify trace amounts of drugs or explosives on them.

    …

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  • Cocaine seems to hijack brain pathways that prioritise food and water

    Cocaine seems to hijack brain pathways that prioritise food and water

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    Illustration of the reward pathway in the human brain

    Illustration of the reward pathway in the human brain

    FERNANDO DA CUNHA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

    Persistent use of drugs such as cocaine and morphine is thought to affect the way the brain prioritises the body’s basic needs — and we are now getting to the bottom of how this comes about.

    When people repeatedly misuse drugs, they might see long-term changes in their behaviour that lead them to choose to take drugs instead of doing essential things like eating and drinking.

    A brain pathway called the mesolimbic reward system is suspected to be involved in this process, but few studies have directly compared the system’s response to taking drugs with the response of innate needs being met.

    Now, Bowen Tan at Rockefeller University in New York and his colleagues have shown that the same neurons are activated in these two circumstances. They uncovered this using a sophisticated microscopy set-up that allowed them to track the activity of individual neurons in the brains of mice going through withdrawal following repeated exposures to these drugs.

    “The field has long been debating whether there is a specialised cell type that encodes drug value only and a specialised cell type that encodes natural reward value only,” says Tan. “What we saw is that these drugs of abuse commonly activate the same set of neurons as the natural rewards.”

    The researchers also observed that the neural response to satisfying basic needs became disorganised after the mice were given cocaine or morphine, which occurred alongside a decreased consumption of food and water.

    “What is really notable about this finding is that strong neural responses to food or water almost become displaced by responses to drugs,” says Jeremy Day at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “[This suggests] that drug rewards are able to override how the brain translates need states into behaviours that satisfy those needs.”

    Tan and his team also identified a gene, called Rheb, that seems to be necessary for drugs to have this effect. Rheb is part of a cell-signalling pathway that is also found in people, so future work could investigate how inhibiting this pathway could be used as a therapy for substance misuse, he says.

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