alcohol
dr. dolittle | May 18, 2016
The Michigan Physiological Society, a chapter of the American Physiological Society, held their 3rd annual meeting last week. As mentioned in a prior post, the keynote address was given by Comparative Physiologist Dr. Hannah Carey (University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine). You can read about her research in the prior post.
Here are other highlights from the meeting:
Seminars:
Photo of crayfish by "Krebse in Österreich", own work, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=858592
...or as I prefer to view them:
Image of crayfish dinner By Игоревич (Own work…
dr. dolittle | June 15, 2015Just one more example of how much humans and chimpanzees have in common. Check out this podcast describing wild chimpanzees seen drinking fermented tree sap as well as the video below.
Supplement video uploaded by the study's authors (Hockings et al., Royal Society Open Science, 2015) on Youtube.
Sources:
Scientific American
KJ Hockings, N Bryson-Morrison, S Carvalho, M Fujisawa, T Humle, WC McGrew, M Nakamura, G Ohashi, Y Yamanashi, G Yamakoshi, T Matsuzawa. Tools to tipple: ethanol ingestion by wild chimpanzees using leaf-sponges. Royal Society Open Science. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.150150 (…
lborkowski | August 18, 2014On NPR's Morning Edition earlier today, Laura Starecheski reported on efforts to use peer groups to prevent young men from becoming rapists. She set the stage by talking with psychologist David Lisack about a study he (and colleague Paul M. Miller of Brown University School of Medicine) conducted among male University of Massachusetts Boston students and published in Violence and Victims in 2002. Knowing that the majority of rapes are never reported to authorities, and wanting to know whether serial rapists were responsible for many of them, Lisack and Brown took a direct approach: They asked…
lborkowski | June 17, 2014A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Sommer Mathis at CityLab: What If the Best Way to End Drunk Driving Is to End Driving?
Dylan Matthews at Vox: More evidence that giving poor people money is a great cure for poverty
Tressie McMillan Cottom in the Washington Post: No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are.
Mariya Strauss at Political Research Associates: Dark Money, Dirty War: The Corporate Crusade Against Low-Wage Workers
Fred Schulte at The Center for Public Integrity: Why Medicare Advantage costs taxpayers billions more than it should
milhayser | September 29, 2013The U.S. "war on drugs," besides failing to meet its goals, has demonstrated a stubborn ignorance of the effects that different drugs have in the human body. Granted, some drugs cause degeneration and are properly outlawed. Opiates such as heroin and stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine take a harsh physical toll and leave users addicted to the chemical. But classified along with these truly dangerous drugs are some of nature's most mysterious medicines. New research shows how marijuana, psychedelics, MDMA and even ketamine have positive physiological and psychological effects that…
milhayser | March 28, 2012There are many factors that can drive an organism to drink. Some might have a genetic predisposition—others might want to poison a parasitic wasp before it consumes them from the inside out. On ERV, new research shows "the epigenetics of the cells in the brains of alcoholics is messed up;" specifically, alcoholic brains express transposable genetic elements (such as endogenous retroviruses) more frequently. Smith writes "the authors think that ERVs are not just a marker of the damage caused by alcoholism, but that the ERVs are actively contributing to the brain damage due to alcoholism." But…
jeure | February 17, 2012No one credits heavy drinking with making people smarter - the mind-numbing effects are well documented. Odds are that if you haven't experienced this personally, you've witnessed it in the foolish antics of others. The clear correlation between rapidly diminishing intelligence and rising alcohol consumption is no secret.
But the long-term effects may go deeper than a morning headache or a need to wear sunglasses inside. A new study conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory reveals that genetic factors can make some individuals more susceptible than others to lasting neurological damage…
lborkowski | November 2, 2010The Associated Press article title "Study: Alcohol more lethal than heroin, cocaine" succeeded in getting me to click through to the article. When I did, I wasn't surprised to learn that the study in question didn't actually find alcohol to be more lethal than heroin. What it concluded was that alcohol is the most harmful drug (out of 20 studied) when harms both to users and to those around them are tallied.
The study -- authored by David J. Nutt, Leslie A. King, and Lawrence D. Phillips and published in The Lancet -- used multicriteria decision analysis modelling to assess the harms caused…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There's a new medical study of the effects of alcohol consumption that finds a surprising result:
Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting…
tsmith | April 23, 2010Student guest post by Francis Mawanda
If you are like me, you probably always and almost faithfully, include a bottle of mouthwash on your grocery list especially after watching and/or listening to the numerous commercials in the media which claim that you will not only get long lasting fresh breath, but also freedom from the germs that cause plaque and gingivitis. However, many proprietary mouthwashes including my favorite brand contain Alcohol (ethanol) which also gives them the characteristic burn we have to endure, albeit for a few seconds each day, but safe in the knowledge that the…
bleimanb | February 26, 2010It turns out I have more in common with my favorite animal than I thought. NOTE: Usually I find an article and then regurgitate it into the cheeping mouths of our readers in my own words. In this case, I kind of like how the article was written in the first place, so I'm just going to link to it..
Great pic.
Thanks to NVDH for uncovering this one.
P.S. Isn't it hilarious when you go to make a tag called "alcohol" for a piece on the blog, but that tag has already been created? Clearly we've covered this topic before.
razib | January 24, 2010Changes in human diet driven by cultural evolution seem to be at the root of many relatively recently emerged patterns of genetic variation. In particular, lactase persistence and varied production of amylase are two well known cases. Both of these new evolutionary genetic developments are responses to the shift toward carbohydrates over the last 10,000 years as mainstays of caloric intake. Rice and wheat serve as the foundations of much of human civilization. It is notable that both China and India are divided into rice and wheat (or millet) belts, so essential are modes of agriculture in…
jchosy | January 3, 2010There's a really good point that has been brought up many times about scientists. We suck at sharing our results with the public. Or sometimes we share, but in a way that very few people (scientists included) could understand. One of the problems may be a lack of emphasis on the big "So what?" People are much more interested if they understand the relevance of the findings to normal life. I find it helps to relate the concepts to more familiar things in my life.
For example, fish researchers from the University of New South Wales recently published a paper on the effects of small…
grrlscientist | December 26, 2009tags: kitchen science, science abuse, christmas lights, microwave oven, funny, humor, brainiac, streaming video
This video shows one of several dangerous kitchen experiments conducted by real scientists who video them -- all so you don't have to repeat them yourself.
bioephemera | May 29, 2009
Thank goodness Science has finally given us protection against. . . Kooties!
Kootie Killer promises to "kill 99.9% of germs & Kooties without water!" This claim is clearly rigorously lab-tested and evidence-based, but although I wouldn't dream of questioning its veracity, it does invite the question. . . what the heck is a Kootie?
Personally, I always thought cooties (with a "c") were symbiotic, invisible organisms that spontaneously accrued on children, causing healthy developmental conflict with members of the opposite sex. Shows you what I know. Apparently, the Kootie is a yellow-…
razib | April 30, 2009
I'm in the mood for a "feel good" story with the past week's fixation in swine flu. Half A Glass Of Wine A Day May Boost Life Expectancy By Five Years:
The Dutch authors base their findings on a total of 1,373 randomly selected men whose cardiovascular health and life expectancy at age 50 were repeatedly monitored between 1960 and 2000.
Here are the findings:
And men who drank only wine, and less than half a glass of it a day, lived around 2.5 years longer than those who drank beer and spirits, and almost five years longer than those who drank no alcohol at all.
Drinking wine was strongly…
edyong | March 9, 2009Pregnant women are generally advised to avoid drinking alcohol and for good reason - exposing an unborn baby to alcohol can lead to a range of physical and mental problems from hyperactivity and learning problems to stunted growth, abnormal development of the head, and mental retardation.
But alcohol also has much subtler effects on a foetus. Some scientists have suggested that people who get their first taste of alcohol through their mother's placenta are more likely to develop a taste for it in later life. This sleeper effect is a long-lasting one - exposure to alcohol in the womb has been…
purepedantry | January 20, 2009Radley Balko over at Reason has an interview with John McCardell, the former president of Middlebury College, who initiated the Amethyst Initiative -- a "collective of college presidents urging a public discussion about the drinking age." Here is what he had to say:
Q: Do you favor setting the federal drinking age at 18 or removing federal involvement altogether?
A: I would defer to the Constitution, which gives the federal government no authority to set a national federal drinking age at all. It's clearly supposed to be left to the states. So the first thing we need to do is cut out the 10…
purepedantry | August 25, 2008I talked last week about the pros and cons of lowering the drinking age back to 18. One of the cons that I had assumed was that lowering the drinking age would increase the number of traffic fatalities in the 18-20 cohort.
A study from NBER disputes this argument. Miron and Tetelbaum looked at the data from different states that voluntarily raised their drinking ages to 21 before federal law tied highways funds to that age in 1984 -- forcing to states to raise the age. They wanted to understand the time course of changes in traffic fatalities both before and after the implementation of…