“Looks don’t matter, it’s what you do that counts.” This quote from Skipper, from “Penguins of Madagascar” is the general theme throughout the work of Annelies Cannaert, a Ph.D. student at the Laboratory of Toxicology at Ghent University, Belgium. Annelies, who will defend her Ph.D. thesis on May 25th, developed a novel concept to detect so-called ‘designer drugs.” Rather than being based on a compound’s structure, as conventional methods do, the alternative concept utilizes a compound’s activity. This makes it possible to screen for the presence of drugs, even without knowing a drug’s identity.