I learned recently about “Vin Mariani” a wine from the 1860s that was fortified with coca leaves and contained 6mg per liquid ounce of the wine; except for the bottles sold in USA where it was 7.2mg per ounce, because there were other patent medicines that had cocaine in them and the manufacturer added a bit more to be competitive in the market.
The Pope of the time loved the stuff and awarded the company a Vatican medal for it.
While I love the Internet and all sorts of modern life fixtures (in a developed country), I feel a bit like I missed out by not being alive when all the crazy drinks were around.
never knew this was a thing. seems it's still available to buy! sounds like a more respectable version of Buckfast, the tonic wine made in an abbey in Devon that had/has a cult popularity with the youth of parts of Ireland and Scotland
Could this not have been simply an instinct to find cleaner waters? I'm surprised they didn't add another control group which injected something unpleasant that could be naturally found in an area, but would be undesirable - ammonia, some sort of acid, or something along those lines.
The study want to prove that cocaine is yet another polluter thar alters the fish behaviour even in the small quantities that can be found in the wild in polluted areas. Not that something is special or different about cocaine pollution.
So the control group in this case are fishes with an implant with no drug at all.
Coffee can do strange things to animals. There's a study where NASA gave various drugs to spiders to see how it affected their webs[0]. Coffee had a stranger effect on the web than marijuana.
Because even in low concentrations, I expect cocaine to have a different effect than Valium. (And in both case I expect a different effect at high concentrations.)
And just like that, smoked Salmon became popular again :)
BTW, did you knew municipalities can easily measure fluctuations in drug usage by testing the sewage water? In fact, sometimes they can see clear differences between different parts of the city.
Is data like that sold anywhere? I wonder if there’s an analytics market for profiling neighborhoods based on sewage water content now. If my browser history wasn’t already rock bottom, that’s a new low for the ad market
Fun fact: if you sign up for many online casinos or betting sites they will indeed use Google Streetview to lookup your house to estimate how much money they might extract from you.
Their strategy is more in-depth than that, and they’re more accurately looking for sharps. Somebody working minimum wage in a trailer betting for “their guy” isn’t a problem, even if they’re not going to make the book much money. Somebody working minimum wage in a trailer smurfing for a sharp can be a huge problem. You can read first hand info from professional bettors, books don’t like to reveal their risk management methodology for obvious reasons.
You would think so, but you have to remember that customer profitability is exponentially distributed. I e., one addict gambling away their and their loved ones life savings is worth more than hundreds or thousands of regular players. Thus, focusing on acquiring and retaining such addicts makes perfect economic sense. So much that individual sign-ups are analyzed down to Facebook stalking and Streetview googling. Much in the same way the addicts hunt for the big win which will make them rich do the casinos hunt for the whales that will fund the whole office for months.
Streetview and a visual model seems excessive when there's plenty of databrokers straight up selling your mortgage info and shopping habits (from CC purchases)
> BTW, did you knew municipalities can easily measure fluctuations in drug usage by testing the sewage water?
Yep. Not just drugs are monitored this way, but also the spread of infectious diseases. That can lead to sometimes pretty weird findings - for example, polio virus is supposed to be extinct, but every so often it shows up in sewage monitoring of major German cities [1]. The cause most likely are people (tourists and immigrants) from Africa and Asia that got an attenuated virus-based vaccination in their home country shortly before they came here.
Covid is, at least in Bavaria, also part of the regular monitoring schedule [2], Austria monitors for Covid, RSV and influenza [3].
Depends on your threshold for credentials and desired pay range. If you've got speed, a stream, and a dream, you can coke up as many fish as you want. It's science as long as you write it down.
I wonder about the root cause. Can it be explained as: (1) Stimulant helps the fish to swim more distance? (2) Inhibition is lowered so the fish is more willing to explore?
Totally. They may wander up bad river, strung out looking for another hit - SNAP! Killed by a bear. My fellow Salmon, please talk to your roe about the dangers of drugs.
Whether it is or is not, is not a function of the cocaine though, but rather idiosyncrasies of the wider ecologies the salmon are in.
If roaming more widely introduces them to more productive food opportunities (or, lower predation) than their closer ecology, then it would be beneficial for them. If it does not, then it wouldn't be. Neither context is determined in the basic finding that cocaine causes them to roam more widely.
Even in the case it were to benefit the salmon, that could still cause secondary problems: something like how nutrient pollution causes some species to run rampant.
The Pope of the time loved the stuff and awarded the company a Vatican medal for it.
Mark Twain wrote about it and apparently really enjoyed the drink. The drink was made with Pisco, pineapple juice and cocaine
Pour yourself a nice glass of wine with some coke on the side?
The study want to prove that cocaine is yet another polluter thar alters the fish behaviour even in the small quantities that can be found in the wild in polluted areas. Not that something is special or different about cocaine pollution.
So the control group in this case are fishes with an implant with no drug at all.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)...
I expect the fish to be more active. A coffee patch would be a nice 4th group as another control.
[1] Chewing the leaves of coke is common in many countries of South America, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acullico
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210327150247/https://arachnidl...
Caffeine is a chemical that plants evolved multiple times independently as an insecticide.
It's almost unbelievable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2HipedgM3I
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Fish lack urea cycle, so they produce and excrete significant amounts of ammonia as part of normal metabolism.
BTW, did you knew municipalities can easily measure fluctuations in drug usage by testing the sewage water? In fact, sometimes they can see clear differences between different parts of the city.
https://wastewater-observatory.jrc.ec.europa.eu/#/content/th...
Also, Wastewater analysis and drugs — a European multi-city study:
https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/pods/waste-water-ana...
Yep. Not just drugs are monitored this way, but also the spread of infectious diseases. That can lead to sometimes pretty weird findings - for example, polio virus is supposed to be extinct, but every so often it shows up in sewage monitoring of major German cities [1]. The cause most likely are people (tourists and immigrants) from Africa and Asia that got an attenuated virus-based vaccination in their home country shortly before they came here.
Covid is, at least in Bavaria, also part of the regular monitoring schedule [2], Austria monitors for Covid, RSV and influenza [3].
[1] https://www.aerzteblatt.de/news/erreger-der-kinderlaehmung-i...
[2] https://bay-voc.lgl.bayern.de/abwassermonitoring
[3] https://abwasser.ages.at/de/
Salmons get crazy and shine after prolonged walks with Lucy in the sky and some diamonds;
The salmons in question just hanged out with White Stripes.
Save the fish.
If roaming more widely introduces them to more productive food opportunities (or, lower predation) than their closer ecology, then it would be beneficial for them. If it does not, then it wouldn't be. Neither context is determined in the basic finding that cocaine causes them to roam more widely.