2/14/07

Crack Spider

I try to keep everything on this blog at least tangentially related to music. This is very funny video and one could argue that it does have some relevance to music. Thank you Damien for this one.

Spiders On Drugs

Scientists at the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have turned their attention from the mysteries of the cosmos to a more esoteric area of research: what happens when you get a spider stoned. Their experiments have shown that common house spiders spin their webs in different ways according to the psychotropic drug they have been given. Nasa scientists believe the research demonstrates that web-spinning spiders can be used to test drugs because the more toxic the chemical, the more deformed was the web.

* Spiders on marijuana made a reasonable stab at spinning webs but appeared to lose concentration about half-way through.

* Those on Benzedrine - "speed" - spin their webs "with great gusto, but apparently without much planning leaving large holes", according to New Scientist magazine.

* Caffeine, one of the most common drugs consumed in soft drinks, tea and coffee, makes spiders incapable of spinning anything better than a few threads strung together at random.

* On chloral hydrat, an ingredient of sleeping pills, spiders "drop off before they even get started".

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

LA Weekly:"Yet it turns out that these eight-legged arthropods are a whole lot smarter than we have imagined — some at least are capable of almost mammalian intelligence."

Adam said...

don't forget, it was the THC spiders who invented jazz.

Hucbald said...

That was hysterical, David!

I need to cut down on the caffeine. LOL!