It’s publications like these that makes science so much fun, and has me thinking that Howard Chaykin was more prescient than he intended to be with his 80s-era oeuvre American Flagg!

You remember this comic book… Martian Reuben Flagg gets assigned to the Chicago Nexus Ranger station and winds up having to work with Raul, the talking cat who was addicted to the television show “Interspecies Romance”.

So what exactly does interspecies romance have to do with science? Well, a Can-Am collaboration between the University of Toronto and the University of California, Riverside has generated a publication in Nature entitled: “Specialized cells tag sexual and species identity in Drosophila melanogaster” (article link).

Okay, so I can already hear the foreheads smacking onto desktops.

However, Joel Levine’s team show some interesting implications in regards to chemical signaling and the importance of pheromones in that the elimination of pheromone-producing cells short-circuits both sex and species identification and differentiation. To put it bluntly, the modified flies couldn’t distinguish between themselves and other species, much less between male and female within their own species.

I could say that this could explain some of the people I went to undergrad with, but I guess I won’t.

Anyway, it’s good work that deserves being published in Nature and you should learn something and read the article. There is also some potential hope on the pharma end of things for the legion of otaku to cling to should the signaling pathways also be present in primates (hello, Pfieth? product idea here).

And for those of you who started to read this because of your interest in hot amateur Drosophila boy-on-boy action, you’re in luck: Nature is hosting a Quicktime movie clip associated with the article and you can get your fix by clicking here (I’ve provided some fly pr0n for you while you wait for the 19.3 MB download to complete).

Just try not to watch it while at work because your management might not understand your umm… “hobby”. And wash your hands.

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