The Consequences of a Boozy Youth

Boozing it up in adolescence contributes to risky behavior in adulthood, according to a new study with rats. Some researchers suspect that the same is true for people, but they’ve had a hard time establishing whether adolescent drinking makes people prone to risk-taking or whether risk-prone people are simply more likely to start drinking as teenagers. Although the new work doesn’t settle the issue, it bolsters the case that early alcohol use can cause lasting changes in behavior.

Some of the best data available show that people who start drinking as adolescents and drink more heavily then are more likely to have problems with alcohol and drug abuse later in life, says Ilene Bernstein, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the senior author of the new study. But those studies have fallen short of determining cause and effect, Bernstein says. To get around this pitfall, she and her colleagues turned to rats, assigning individuals from a genetically identical strain to either drinking or teetotaling groups.

Although rats don’t voluntarily like to drink alcohol, the researchers found they could entice the rodents with spiked gelatin–the murine equivalent of the Jell-O shots beloved by college students everywhere. Adolescent rats assigned to the drinking group had access to the stuff for 20 days. They consumed the equivalent of “multiple, multiple drinks” a day but spread their drinking over many hours and never appeared visibly drunk, Bernstein says. Read more …

Biofuels Not So Friendly to Gulf of Mexico

The push to ramp up biofuel production may reduce oil imports, but it’s likely to come at a high environmental cost: It will boost the size of the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone, a huge swath so depleted of oxygen that almost nothing can live there, according to a new analysis.

The gulf’s dead zone is already a major environmental problem. First spotted in 1971, it now spans 14,600 square kilometers, or 1,460,000 hectares, a region larger than Connecticut. It is triggered every spring and summer when nutrient-rich water flows from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers into the Gulf of Mexico. The nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorus, come primarily from fertilizer washed off of farms throughout the Midwest. They trigger blooms of algae that then die and are eaten by bacteria. The bacteria use up most of the water’s dissolved oxygen, killing fish, shrimp, crabs, and other organisms. Read more …

3D cinema was the big idea that never took off - but with digital technology and better specs, will it finally to leap out and grab us?

By Paul Connolly. It’s the stupid goggles, right? Surely they are the reason why 3D movies – which have been around for more than a century and enjoyed a golden age in the 1950s with Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder and then a resurgence in the 1980s with classics such as Jaws 3-D – have never really taken off.

The glasses look stupid, fall apart at a touch, slip off your nose all too readily and are not so much 3D as 0D.

And if you’re a spectacles wearer, well, forget it – 3D movies are not for you. Read more …