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Evidence suggests that driving high may be less dangerous than driving drunk, but driving stoned is still driving impaired — and assuming otherwise could get you killed. More »
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Are you more creative when you're drunk? It's one of those soundbites that you're liable to hear a friend spout off somewhere between their fourth and fifth beer — a little factoid that might actually sound somewhat feasible if only there were a scientific study lying around to back it up. More »
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Scientists this week published a study that reveals what the human brain looks like under the influence of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic chemical found in magic mushrooms. More »
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Imagine sitting with your oldest and dearest friend some time in the not-so-distant future, when you decide to pop open a bottle of perfectly aged cabernet sauvignon. After giving the wine some time to breathe, your friend pours a glass, swirls, sniffs, sips, and says, with a sigh, "My god, it's full of stars." And you point out that it's not stars they're tasting in that wine, but meteorite. More »
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Ever notice that 'eighty proof' liquor is only forty percent alcohol? Why do booze-makers feel the need to inflate their numbers like this? More »
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On the fence about legalizing marijuana? If so, consider this: legalizing weed could save your life. In the most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted, the Institute for the Study of Labor has revealed in a provisional discussion paper that the legalization of medical marijuana in the United States is linked to a dramatic decrease in traffic fatalities. More »
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Drugs play a huge role in our lives, but it's hard to find in-depth research on how people take them and what effect it has on their lives. Here's your chance to help change that. More »
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We've known for a while now that moderate wine-drinking can confer some health benefits. Now a new study reveals moderate beer consumption can also reduce the risk of heart disease by 31%. So what's behind this unexpected health benefit? More »
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There is a "fact" going around the internet that a person is more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than a poisonous spider. But can a champagne cork really murder a human being? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5848942&view=rss&microfeed=true Cigarettes and booze are either two crippling addictions that often go hand in hand, or two great tastes that taste great together, depending on who you ask. People who have problems with both are often labelled "addictive personalities" but it turns out there might be something in our brain chemistry that ties both of these addictions together, and might give us a way to fight it. More »
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From equine marijuana farmers to drunk elks caught in apple trees — yes, it's that kind of weekend. More »
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Alcohol has its uses, medically speaking, and one of them might be staving off dementia and other forms of cognitive impairment. Moderate social drinking appears to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's and similar diseases by a massive 23 percent. More »
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It's a fairly well-known idea that people start looking better and better the more one drinks alcohol. But is there actually a scientific reasoning behind this? It might all have to do with a little something called bilateral symmetry. More »
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There's a terrific article in the Smithsonian today about "beer archaeologist" Patrick McGovern, a scholar who has unearthed millennia-old alcohol recipes by analyzing residues in ancient pottery. Now he's working with a brewer, Sam Calagione, whose pub Dogfish Head serves up beers based on recipes that are thousands of years old. More »
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After a hard day of batting around Angels, nothing tastes crisper than a bottle of officially sanctioned $624 Evangelion wine. Sure, you could buy 312 bottles of Thunderbird with that money, but Thunderbird doesn't have mecha on the label. More »
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The Buffalo Theory is a popular urban legend which holds that the neuron-nerfing quality of alcohol can boost your intelligence. The basic idea is as follows: by targeting the weakest of your brain cells, alcohol actually aids in a process of natural selection, improving the overall performance of your brain by picking off the weakest members of its neuronal herds. Now, research published in today's issue of Neuron has shown that the driving concept behind this specious hypothesis is actually more or less correct. More »
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Let me start this article by saying; Oh my god, people die from this. People burn their houses down. People explode themselves. People poison themselves. Learn from this article. Use it to inform your upcoming scifi novel about space speakeasies during space prohibition. (Oh, it'll happen.) But don't actually do this. More »
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To ring in the International Year of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society is celebrating the practical applications of chemistry by giving tips on the perfect Bloody Mary. More »
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For nearly as long as humans have walked the Earth, they've had beer waiting for them when they got home. Beer and brewing date back thousands of years, but it's still anyone's guess which ancient culture drank the first beer. More »
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Stout beer, with its tiny bubbles and legendary head, requires special equipment to be poured out correctly. A new team thinks that people could get the same result by dirtying the beer up. More »
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Have you ever found yourself thinking, "Mice are pretty great, but wouldn't it be awesome if they were more pretentious?" That was apparently the thinking behind this 2008 experiment that tried to turn regular mice into wine snobs. More »
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An archeobotanist has figured out how they made beer in 500 BC. With a ditch in the back yard, some barley seeds, and some henbane, you too can drink up like the ancient Celts. More »
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Wine makes superconductors better at their jobs. And apparently, it makes some scientists better at their jobs too. More »
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A violent method of opening champagne bottles helps explain how pyrex dishes are manufactured to be harder to break than regular glass, and more. More »
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The Sierra Club provides evidence that they throw the best parties here, with an extensive list of (figuratively) green liquors. More »
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In a feat of holiday science, the British Medical Journal has published a paper debunking the Danish urban myth that soaking your toes in alcohol will get you drunk. More »
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Finnish divers recently discovered several crates of champagne and beer from a sunken ship that had been at the bottom of the Baltic Sea for nearly two centuries. The experts carefully identified, researched, and analyzed the alcohol...then they drank it. More »
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Men are up to twice as likely to become alcoholics than women, and a new study indicates that this propensity may be tied to dopamine production. Researchers found that men's brains are hardwired to release more dopamine when consuming booze. More »
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Pouring a thin layer of cream on top of Tia Maria coffee liqueur results in a in a constantly-roiling cell pattern on the surface of the cream. What's driving the motion? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5656640&view=rss&microfeed=true From the annals of "I didn't need science to tell me that was true" we have yet another experiment undertaken purely because scientists like drinking games. To understand the true meaning of Beer Pong, a group of researchers substituted water for beer (which seems to me to undermine the integrity of the experimental conditions but oh well) and monitored how much research subjects drank of the water while playing what I guess would be called Water Pong. Using a computer simulation, they determined how much alcohol the subjects would have consumed, and how drunk they would be. The results? Seriously drunk, especially due to the rapidity of consumption. More »
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Alcohol consumption might seem like a particularly human trait, but animals can get drunk too... as long as researchers supply the booze. It turns out bees are the perfect little drunkards, which provides a great way to study alcohol abuse. More »
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Beer! The head on a glass of beer is a different color than the body, and yet the chemical make-up is the same. Why? More »
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Teens who binge drink may be permanently damaging their short term memory. A new study of how alcohol affects the brains of young monkeys may shed light on how teen alcoholics risk long-term cognitive impairment. More »
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To finish the script for his indie-music mage miniseries Phonogram: The Singles Club, comic scribe Kieron Gillen took a novel approach - he drank whatever the characters in his comic drank. Unfortunately for Gillen, his characters pounded swill. More »
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Booze, for all its magical wonder, still has big drawbacks: You can't sober up quickly, and you often get a hangover. Now Korean researchers have found a way of tweaking booze to limit the fallout — without cutting its strength. More »
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It's been said for years that drinking while pregnant could damage the child, and now science has come up with a reason why, claiming that alcohol can chemically alter a fetus' DNA. Is this the start of Booze Mutants? More »
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In the chronologically later Star Trek series, Starfleet officers rarely worried about overindulging thanks to synthehol, a substance that mimicked alcohol's effects without the drunkeness and hangovers. Now a team of researchers are working to make synthehol a reality. More »
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A new retrospective study found that patients admitted to hospitals with traumatic head injuries had a higher rate of survival if they'd been drinking. Further study is warranted, though, before handing out Jell-O shots at the ER. [via Ars Technica] More »
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A bottle of cheap tequila is good for making margaritas or forgetting a night out. But a team of Mexican scientists have discovered a new use for the potent liquor: forming diamonds. It just so happens that the popular Mexican alcohol is the ideal compound for creating one of the hardest substances on Earth. More »
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That alcohol causes many deaths every year is a fact widely-accepted by scientists and the public. But now a new study conducted at the University of Toronto suggests that there is a direct relationship between amount of alcohol sold in a given region, and the amount of violence in that region — regardless of whether the people involved in the violence have been drinking. As you can see from this chart the researchers devised, your chances of being assaulted in a given area generally increase as booze purchased in the last 24 hours increases. More »
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