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.
Transparency is the slogan of a new, heterogeneous movement. The demand for transparency unites very different orientations. Many conservatives feel that transparency is similar to anarchy. However, transparency is not primarily there to make it difficult for the powerful to hide their ways. That is just how transparency sells among liberals.
Transparency is stability! Opaque systems may fail entirely due to compromised secrecy. A transparent system is immune against that failure mode.
Perhaps a bit too simple, but certainly appealing. Extensions of the Standard Model which imply the existence of a new U(1) gauge group to complement the SU(2)xU(1) structure of electroweak interactions have been put forth in a number of slightly different versions. All imply the existence of a new Z' boson, a heavier version of the Z0. For those not yet introduced to the latter, the Z0 is the neutral vector boson hypothesized by Glashow, Salam and Weinberg in the sixties to complete a triplet of weak currents and thereby allow the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions.
Science 'consensus' is a dirty word to the environmental community - some of the time.
When it comes to global warming, the science consensus is accurate but when it comes to food, biologists are in the control of Big Business and government lobbyists and the science consensus is out to kill us.
I have been an active member of the self-described Community of Reason since about 1997. By that term I mean the broad set encompassing skeptics, atheists and secular humanists (and all the assorted synonyms thereof: freethinkers, rationalists, and even brights). The date is easily explainable: in 1996 I had moved from Brown University — where I did my postdoc — to the University of Tennessee, were I was appointed assistant professor in the Departments of Botany and of Ecology&Evolutionary Biology.
Urban legend says that alcohol is a social icebreaker - and we want to believe, given our preference for commercials where impossibly attractive young people converge on some beach and all have a fantastic time, which is in contrast to actual beer gatherings
where a lot of fights and arrests occur.(1)
Want to look like this? Drink alcohol. Credit: Shutterstock
British women no longer feel inferior next to sassy siren Spaniards or chic French women. They are taller - in heels, anyway. Brits sport a towering 3.3 inch heel on average.
3,792 women across five European countries (France, Germany, Spain, Denmark and the UK) were questioned in a survey by footcare company COMPEED. Spanish women were second at an average 3.2 inches, the Danish were at 3, Germans at 2.7 and French women at 2.4 inches. 25% of British women said that they often wear heels over 4 inches and 3% are adding on 6 inches of height.
Whenever 'the poor' and 'minorities' are invoked in the same headline, it's good to set your skepticism filter extra low or you will likely never get through the first paragraph of an article (umm, including this one) because the issue is rarely science or even policy, it is instead advocacy.(1)
