

Wily Cockroaches Find Another Survival Trick: Laying Off the Sweets - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/science/a-bitter-sweet-shift-in-cockroach-defenses.html?hp&_r=0

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pcvarmint
AP article is more detailed: [http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cockroaches-
quickly-lose-swee...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cockroaches-quickly-lose-
sweet-tooth-survive)

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steve-howard
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

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

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

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jumblesale
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.

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

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

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

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

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klenwell
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.

