SSS 2008-07-29

（单词翻译）

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This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Cynthia Graber. This will just take a minute.

There are plenty of tales of animals finding some alcohol and getting tipsy. But those stories usually involve manmade beer or wine. There’s been no evidence of animals seeking out naturally fermented¹ fruit in the wild—until now. Researchers stumbled upon the first example of animals looking for a drink in the Malaysian rainforest. The scientists noticed a yeasty smell wafting² from a local palm. They saw a frothy substance, like the head on a mug of beer. It turns out the palm’s nectar has as much alcohol as some beer does. Then scientists followed two tiny mammals – the pentailed treeshrew slow loris. The critters dip into the nectar several times nightly. They regularly guzzle³ the equivalent of about nine drinks a night—though they don’t display what we’d consider drunken behavior. And they act as the plant’s pollinator. The research appeared in the Proceedings⁴ of the National Academy of Sciences. The pentailed treeshrew is a living version of an ancient mammal, a kind of relic⁵ of the mammals from which both shrews and primates⁶ –  and eventually humans – branched off. So this discovery could lend some weight to the hypothesis that our love of the hard stuff has a deep evolutionary⁷ history. I’ll toast to that.

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Cynthia Graber.