Fruit Flies On Methamphetamine Die Largely as a Result of Anorexia

The abuse of methamphetamine can have significant harmful side effects in humans. It burdens the body with toxic metabolic byproducts and weakens the heart, muscles and bones. It alters energy metabolism in the brain and kills brain cells.

Previous studies have shown that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a good model organism for studying the effects of methamphetamine on the body and brain. Researchers have found that meth exposure has similar toxicological effects in fruit flies and in humans and other mammals.

Artificial Beginnings: Understanding the Origin of Life by Recreating It

The Origin of Life on Earth was certainly, in retrospect, and from the human vantage point, the most fateful event in the history of the Universe. On a young, tepid Earth chemistry sprung into biology and set course on a four billion year journey that would eventually lead to us. However, all traces of the first, primitive organisms have vanished. They were outcompeted and devoured by their evolutionary descendents, leaving nothing to form fossils. Though we will never be able to set eyes on the first Earthlings, the first pioneers, we can understand what they must have been like through more subtle, indirect approaches. Comparative biochemistry across the whole of life takes us back quite a ways, though not to the first cells. The most recent common ancestor shared by all living organisms—bacteria, plants, animals, fungi, archaea, and unicellular eukaryotes like amoebae—was born long after the first cell ceased to exist. The only way we can truly understand what life must have been like in its earliest days is to create it ourselves.