You seem to have been inflicted with ignorance ...
* 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.
* 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 by Britons 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".
* The scientists believe their previous work on the goemetry of crystals will help them to devise computer programs that can analyse web-building objectively in order to predict the toxicity of new medicines.
* "It appears that one of the most telling measures of toxicity is a decrease, in comparison with a normal web, of the numbers of completed sides [of a web]; the greater the toxicity, the more sides the spider fails to complete", the scientists say.
* Paul Hillard, spider specialist at the Natural History Museum in London, said researchers first discovered the effects of psychotropic drugs on spiders during experiments at the end of 1960s.
* The researchers fed caffeine to spiders in hope of making them spin webs in the late evening rather than the early dawn.
* The result was eccentric webs rather than earlier spinning, he said.
