Wily Cockroaches Find Another Survival Trick: Laying Off the Sweets | Hacker News Reader

Wily Cockroaches Find Another Survival Trick: Laying Off the Sweets

nytimes.com

27 pointsdanso10 comments

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AP article is more detailed: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cockroaches-quickly-lose-swee...

This is kind of interesting, I'm seeing three different headlines for this article.

Tab title: "Some Cockroaches Avoid Sweet Flavors as a Defense"

URL: a-bitter-sweet-shift-in-cockroach-defenses

Article title: Wily Cockroaches Find Another Survival Trick: Laying Off the Sweets

They edit the articles after they post them, sometimes including the title.

True, but I would think that at least the page title and article heading would be pulled from the same database field.

It bothers me when reporting on evolution seems to attribute it to some invisible hand shaping the way populations change, or in this article making it seem like the cockroaches have made some conscious decision as a group to stop eating sweet things.

"They switched their internal chemistry around so that glucose, a form of sugar that is a sweet come-hither to countless forms of life, tastes bitter."

Either the author of this article doesn't really understand how evolution works or they are poor at explaining the mechanism behind it. I think one of the reasons people grapple with the idea of evolution is because mainstream reporting on it is poor and uses confusing language to deal with the concepts behind it.

Of course science reporting is generally quite poor but with evolution being such a battleground in some places I think it behoves people writing about it to present it clearly and precisely.

If only tech people were so smart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5751329

a pill that would taste sweet foods bitter and bitter foods (vegetables, basically) sweet would be a blockbuster.

Not exactly what you're looking for, but you may find this interesting nonetheless --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum

Found this interesting from the Wikipedia article:

An attempt was made in the 1970s to commercialize the ability of the fruit to turn unsweet foods into sweet foods without a caloric penalty, but ended in failure when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classified the berry as a food additive.

I remember first hearing about these berries a few years ago when they were all the rage for a while, but had not heard that before.

Also somewhat related (this just suppresses sweetness): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnema_sylvestre

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