Last night I was on Eurekalert, the science news wire service, and came across this press release:

Fruit fly sperm makes females do housework after sex
The sperm of male fruit flies are coated with a chemical ‘sex peptide’ which inhibits the female’s usual afternoon siesta and compels her into an intense period of foraging activity…

Wait, what? I have to tell my friends!

I quickly checked the date and time on the research paper, and it was embargoed until 9pm. That meant that at 8:38pm, I couldn’t tell anyone about the news for another 22 minutes. The journal that published the paper, the regal-sounding and yet surprisingly fun Proceedings of the Royal Society B, had probably just posted the paper online today and needed journalists to keep quiet about the research until it was ready for press.

I wondered how much press it would get. On the one hand, it’s funny. That’s a plus. Sexy too (in the sense of “the word sex is mentioned in the article”), double plus. Only thing is, the research isn’t scientifically very significant, compared to the hundreds of other papers that are being published this week. In fact, scientifically this paper is totally unremarkable. A protein that induces a behavioral change in an organism? Story of my (and all our) life!

But I had a feeling this would make the rounds at at least a few newspapers. It’s just too good (of a news item, if not of a research paper) to pass up, and editors will want the page hits.

Sure enough, this morning, as I was grabbing a bowl of cereal and putting up a few tweets for ScienceNOW, the following pops up on someone’s Twitter feed: “Afterglow? No thanks, I’ll do the housework.”

Ok, that’s one general-interest British daily. Doesn’t mean it’s big yet, although some snake-oil salesman might find the article good inspiration for marketing slogans (“sex bomb to housework fiend in an instant!”).

But wait, an hour later the piece makes it onto the blogs. Houston chronicle reporter Eric Berger is the first to the punch, and carries this quote from the lead researcher which I can’t decide is real or made-up:

Isaac says his next study will seek to determine whether the female houseflies are also barefoot at this point.

Finally, I realize the story actually broke 9 hours ago, which is 7am in Britain, on The Telegraph and several other news outlets. That’s 2am last night, which is about when I decided this wouldn’t be big news, abandoned trying to blog it, and went to bed.

Damn, could’ve scooped the Telegraph there.