Sex, food or water? How mice decide
nature.com
nature.com
scientists treated male mice with a technique that mimics the effects of leptin, a hormone that acts
on the brain to suppress appetite. Treated mice were more likely to approach female mice than their
food bowls — even if the test rodents had been deprived of food for almost an entire day.
The paper “addresses a huge gap in the field”, she says. “When you no longer need to eat urgently, it
should free you up to do other things.”
We're looking at the next Ig Nobel prize winner, aren't we?
It very well could have turned out that the mice still chose to eat despite having no hunger. I for one am definitely prone to overeating past the point of satiating hunger, or eating even if I’m not hungry. I find it satisfying and a way to overcome boredom; or maybe a better example is my dog, who I’m pretty certain would eat himself to death if I left his kibble box unlocked.
It seems obvious that the sun revolves around the Earth, but we now know that isn’t true. :-)
they hypothesized that this particular drug/hormone intervention would have a particular effect, and an experiment was needed to confirm the hypothesis. Further experiments might show that they were even wrong even about this one, and there is some other interaction going on to fully explain what's going on.
But how do we know what we believed is really what what it is?
depends on the circumstances, but I can imagine social interactions where food is served still causing me to at least ask for a phone number, so it's clear I'm not entirely sated.
Wouldn't be the first creatures to have an appetite for sex.
Let reddit be reddit and HN be HN please.
"I know this will get downvoted but..."
> even moderately hungry mice prefer to socialize with the opposite sex than to eat, researchers have found.
.. but I understand what you're referring to much further down. Starvation wins.