Countries with strict social rules and behavioral etiquette may foster unruly drinking cultures and characteristic bad behavior, according to a new report on alcohol and violence released today by International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP). The report also lists 11 cultural features that may predict levels of violence such as homicide and spousal abuse.

And the culprit is, of course, not just alcohol, but men.

We cannot change the male propensity for aggression, but we can channel it into appropriate and socially acceptable forms. In particular, we need rites of passage for young people that offer challenge and a route to adult status and recognition. The aim should not be to completely suppress male aggression, but to utilize and channel it constructively.

But alcohol and men together make things worse. Apparently, lacking big animals to hunt, a night at the bar starts to resemble gay porn.

17 years ago, September 26, 1991, 8 brave souls locked themselves inside a sealed dome to simulate what it would be like to live in an artificial closed ecological system.

It was called Biosphere 2 (the original 'biosphere' being Ma Earth here) and was made in Oracle, Arizona by Space Biosphere Ventures.

The idea was to learn about ecology but it ended up being about anthropology as well - as fellow Scientific Blogging scribe Jane Poynter says, they discovered that even in tiny groups, and much as they might have protested the notion in advance, they broke into factions.

Fossil Fuels Brewing Company of Manteca, California is convinced that beer, like wine, takes time to get right. In this case, 45 million years. It's truly a beer no one else can claim to have.

Manteca is a short drive from here so you can bet this story is just beginning. It's for science, after all.

Raul Cano, Cal Poly microbiologist and director of Cal Poly’s Environmental Biotechnology Institute (EBI) caused quite a brew-ha ha(1) with the announcement that beer made from living bacteria extracted from a bee entombed in amber 25-45 million years ago was really, really good.

Truls Thorstensen (EFS Consulting Vienna), Karl Grammer (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology) and other researchers at the University of Vienna say that people make lots of assumptions about sex, age, emotions, and intentions by looking at human faces - and we do it with cars as well.

They're not the first ones to come up with this idea; five year olds have been finding personalities in inanimate objects for thousands of years and my kid has been saying "Ka-chow!" ever since he saw Cars, but they are the first ones to tackle it in a systematic fashion.

How did they do it? They asked people to describe car grills anthropomorphically. Then they used geometric morphometrics to calculate the corresponding shape information, whatever that means. One-third of the respondents associated a human or animal face with over 90 percent of the cars and everyone noted eyes (headlights), a mouth (air intake/grill), and a nose in 50 percent of the cars. Yep, that means people think cars have a personality.