This is scientific Americans.

Science Quickly. I'm Karen Hopkins.

We all have our tricks for sobering up after a night of drunken revelry, maybe a pot of black

coffee or an ice cold shower.

But for mice in a certain lab in Texas, all it takes is a shot.

Not more alcohol.

It's an injection of a hormone called fibroblast growth factor 21 or FGF 21.

A new study shows that a shot of FGF 21, a hormone that regulates metabolic pathways gets intoxicated mice up and running, twice as fast as animals that are allowed to come around on their own.

What's more, mice lacking FGF 21 drink more and take longer to recover

from alcohol's effects than their harmonially competent counterparts. The findings appear in the journal, Cell Metabolism.

The genesis of this particular project was the finding from several laboratories that this particular

hormone that we work on, F-21, is induced dramatically by ethanol.

We wanted to know what does FGF21 do acutely in terms of response to ethanol.

Steve Cleaver is a professor of molecular biology at the University of Texas

Southwestern Medical Center.

I run a lap jointly with this fellow. And this fellow is

David Mangelsdorf. I am a professor and chair of the Department of

Pharmacology at UT South Western and also an investigator of the Howard

Hughes Medical Institute.

The two actually met as postdocs at the Salk Institute in San Diego, but after they went

their separate ways, they found they often gravitated to the same sorts of questions.

And we ended up publishing a couple of big papers back to back during that period.

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