Science

Your Brain On Beer

April 14, 2011

A new study conducted at the Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at The University of Texas at Austin appears to indicate that alcohol actually helps your memory, at least at the synapse level; that “alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better.” The new study, published in the April [...]

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Brewbot: An Automated Homebrewing Machine

April 5, 2011

This is an odd one, if not without a certain interest just for the effort involved and how it works. For a design contest, The RX MCU Design Contest, sponsored by Renesas, an Australian designer, Matt Prattau (a.k.a. Zizzle), created the Brewbot, an automated homebrewing system that does all the work. Here’s his introduction, from [...]

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American Dietetic Ass’n Toasts Beer For Good Health During American Heart Month

February 10, 2011

The Anti-Alcohol wingnuts of the world tend to go apoplectic anytime it’s suggested that alcohol might have any health benefits. It just doesn’t fit their world view. I’ve seen it happen. Oh, some of the comments I’ve gotten. But, of course, myriad studies have shown just that and even our government acknowledged that fact in [...]

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Thoughts On The New Dietary Guidelines From Beer Business Daily

February 3, 2011

You most likely hard that the USDA released the quinquennial Dietary Guidelines for Americans at the end of last month. The 2010 version made a number of small, but significant changes with regard to food, such as “make half your plate fruits and vegetables” and “drink water instead of sugary drinks.” In Chapter 3, they [...]

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Did A Thirst For Beer Spark Civilization?

January 14, 2011

Today’s UK newspaper, The Independent, has a nice write-up of Patrick McGovern’s theory (among others) that it was the desire of early man to brew beer that caused them to abandon their hunter gatherer ways and settle down to a life of farming, in the process sparking nothing short of civilization itself. In the article, [...]

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Beer and Dieting

January 13, 2011

The UK tabloid newspaper, The Daily Mirror, reported today that a study at the University of Barcelona revealed that “[d]rinking up to a pint of beer a day is good for your health — and can even help you lose weight.” They also “found those who have a Mediterranean-style diet and drink moderately are healthier [...]

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Birds Fly, Men Drink

December 16, 2010

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Wright Brothers plane flying at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. Today, 56 years later, the Man Will Never Fly Memorial Society was founded, also at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The society appears to be completely tongue-in-cheek, as evidenced by their “history” and “mission.” Still, you have to long [...]

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Eliminating Drunk Driving 100%

December 12, 2010

So I was reading through the new issue of Playboy magazine that came last week when I came upon an article entitled 15 Innovations That Will Change the World. Some pretty impressive ideas, but the one that stood out for me was “Robocars,” cars that drive themselves using sophisticated sensors, omni-directional video-cameras, radar detectors and [...]

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Nubian Antibiotic Beer

December 9, 2010

For reasons passing understanding, apart from anti-alcohol propaganda, beer is forbidden from advertising its many recognized health benefits. For people against alcohol, saying beer is good for you, or at least isn’t bad for you (in moderation), is apparently the same as saying “drink up.” And for goodness sake, we’d never want to tell people [...]

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FDA To Rule Caffeine Unsafe In Alcohol

November 16, 2010

Harry Schuhmacher, of Beer Business Daily, just issued a news alert that he’s learned from the website of New York Senator Charles Schumer that the FDA “will rule ‘that caffeine is an unsafe food additive to alcoholic beverages, effectively making products such as Four Loko, Joose, and others like them, prohibited for sale in the [...]

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Two New Studies Show Benefits For Beer Drinking Women

November 16, 2010

Two new studies were presented yesterday at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. According to the Wall Street Journal, “[b]oth studies, by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard University, used data from the landmark Nurses’ Health Study, which started in 1976 and involves more than 200,000 women.” The results [...]

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Full Fact Disputes UK Alcohol Statistics

November 9, 2010

In response to the highly unscientific study published in The Lancet last week suggesting alcohol is more dangerous than heroin, FullFact.org — “A [British] independent fact-checking organisation” — asked the question “Are alcohol-related problems on the rise?” Their conclusion? “Full Fact finds little support in the evidence.”

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Beer More Dangerous Than Heroin!?!

November 1, 2010

I suppose it was inevitable. Anti-alcohol folks have been saying for years that alcohol is the worst drug on the planet. And comparing it to heroin is not exactly new, either. A popular neo-prohibitionist PSA shows a beer bottle as a syringe to remind people that alcohol is also a drug. You can even buy [...]

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Busch Jumps On Cold Indicator Label Bandwagon

October 19, 2010

For many years, Coors has been the brewery obsessed with cold. But that may be changing, as Anheuser-Busch InBev is debuting their own cold-activated labels on bottles of Busch Light. ABI is calling their version of the cold-activated label an “ice-cold easy indicator.” According to an article today by AdAge: An “ice-cold easy indicator” thermometer [...]

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European Study Shows Raising Beer Taxes A Bad Idea

October 15, 2010

Earlier this month, the Brewers of Europe — a trade organization of European breweries — released the results of an independent study they commissioned by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. They asked PWC to “quantify the impact of excise taxes on the overall tax collection, and employment and profitability in the brewing sector compared to other alcoholic beverages.” In [...]

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Effects of Alcohol At Different BAC Levels

October 9, 2010

Here’s another interesting infographic created by, of all people, Term Life Insurance, showing The Impact of Alcohol on your Body as your blood-alcohol content percentage increases.

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