It's a love story—so who cares if the lovers are a little unattractive? We can't all be Snow Whites and Prince Charmings. I'm talking about the love affair between fruit flies and brewer's yeast, which scientists so kindly described in a paper published last week in the journal Cell Reports.

If humans can indeed smell fear they wouldn’t be unusual in the animal kingdom. Sea anemones, earthworms, minnows, fruit flies, rats, mice, and deer, among others, have all been shown to signal unease through odor. Some responses are even more overt. For example, the offspring of one bird species vomits up a pungent, orange liquid when frightened by a predator; if a parent catches a whiff, it becomes warier in the nest. 

Among the promiscuous common fruit fly, sexually-transmitted infections run rampant. Female fruit flies, however, have a special kind of defense to lower the potential cost of getting down and dirty with another fly, according to a new study from the University of Bath in the UK. When they get in the mood, female fliescan ramp up their immune defenses against fungal STIs, in what's called immune anticipation.

All cats are gray in the dark, as the ever-wise and ever-lecherous Ben Franklin put it. But how do you figure out if that cat is actually a dog? Scientists don't entirely understand how animals know not to get it on with another species, a evolutionarily useless process that would at best lead to hybrid animals that probably wouldn't survive (or would be sterile, like like mules).

Humans have been using alcohol as a medicine since ancient times, using it as an antiseptic and a pain killer, among other things. We're not the only species that does so, apparently. According to biologists at Emory University, fruit flies force alcohol on their larvae to protect them from parasitic wasps.

Oriental fruit flies are one of the biggest scourges to farmers around the globe, often forcing officials to put crops into quarantine just to keep Bactrocera dorsalis shut out. In Taiwan, where the situation is especially dire, scientists are using artificial intelligence tech that can determine, with uncanny accuracy, where and when an outbreak is about to happen.