In a long-term marriage,  men tend to drink less than they did while single. That's good.  But women drink more, say sociologists. 

Americans learned this week that the leader of the free world likes to brew his own “superb” beer. The Washington Post reported that President Obama likes microbrews “so much so that he bought a beer-making kit (with personal funds) for the White House.”

Now the White House can take the next step and slash its electricity bill, too.

Can robots learn language?  Is understanding a language depending on how we see the world and does a Spanish speaker see the world in the same way as an English one?

Linguistic and cognitive experts are going to argue those issues when they arrive at Northumbria University next week for the fifth annual ‘Embodied and Situated Language Processing 2012’ conference August 28-30.

A sociology paper claims that binge-drinking college students are having a much better time in school than their non-binge-drinking counterparts.

Binge drinking may be popular on campuses not simply because young people have no jobs yet don't live at home, but because binge drinkers are cool and therefore happy with their college experience. According to the surveys, students from higher status groups (i.e., wealthy, male, white, heterosexual, and Greek affiliated undergraduates) were consistently happier with their college social experience than their peers from lower status groups, i.e., poor, female, minority, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (LGBTQ); and not in a sorority or frat.

The world wastes 1.3 billion tons of food per year.  If only scientists could create a "biorefinery" that could change food waste into a key ingredient for making plastics, laundry detergents and scores of other everyday products.  Because wasting less food would just be crazy talk.

The food biorefinery process involves blending the waste foods with a mixture of fungi that excrete enzymes to break down carbohydrates in the food into simple sugars. The blend then goes into a fermenter, a vat where bacteria convert the sugars into succinic acid. Succinic acid is one of those key materials that can be produced from sugars and that could be used to make high-value products - everything from laundry detergents to plastics to medicines.

The start of the Universe may have been more like water freezing into ice than the popular conception of a Big Bang, say theoretical physicists from the University of Melbourne and RMIT University. They have a new hypothesis (conjecture?) which suggests that the secret to understanding the early universe is in the cracks and crevices common to all crystals, including ice.

Lead researcher on the project James Quach said their current ideas are the latest in a long quest by humans to understand the origins and nature of the Universe.