Teetotallers and heavy drinkers are more likely to be anxious or depressed than moderate drinkers, says the Telegraph - but why, exactly?
The research, published in Addiction, looks at alcohol consumption in over 38,000 people, all of whom live in a region of central Norway.
The finding that teetotallers are at greater risk of health problems isn't new, but this paper tries to sort out a major problem with previous studies: many teetotallers are former alcoholics, which means their former lifestyles may be the cause of their problems.
According to the map, key farming states such as Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa will be hardest hit in the US, with temperatures soaring by over 5 °C under a middle-of-the-road scenario. In contrast, Hawaii will "only" warm up by 2.8 °C.
Germany's academic community is being shaken by doubts cast on the integrity of around one hundred professors.
The professors, working across all academic disciplines at many major German universities, are suspected to have accepted thousands of euros in bribes from the now-insolvent Institute for Scientific Consulting ("Institut für Wissenschaftsberatung") in Bergisch-Gladbach, near Cologne.
The scandal is the latest in a series of investigations into the Institute's business practices. Public prosecutors searched its offices back in 2005 and again in March 2008, after malpractice accusations first emerged.
If you're a fan of David Bowie, you might want to take a few deep breaths before watching this video.
Health psychologist Nick Troop of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, used a program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to calculate how Bowie employs different categories of words in his songs. LIWC determines the rate of use of negative and positive words in a text, as well as counting references to things like sex, religion and food.
"I looked at the link between the language used and how long Bowie's
albums had spent in the charts," says Troop. "I found that the songs
with positive emotion and social processes were more successful than
the songs that talked about mortality."
Armed with this information, Troop ventured to write what he modestly calls the "ideal" Bowie song: the catchily titled "Team, Meet Girls; Girls, Meet Team".
Our wallets brim with dirty money, suggests a widely covered study of cocaine-contaminated bank notes.
"Researchers from the American Chemical Society in Washington have discovered that the practice of consuming cocaine through rolled up paper money is far more than just a cinematic cliché. They found that in big cities in the US, up to 90% of the notes tested positive for traces of the drug," reports the Guardian. Scientific Americanhad a similar story.
The BBC notes that figure is up from a study performed 2 years ago that found that two-thirds of bank notes were contaminated with cocaine: "Researchers at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth tested notes from more than 30 cities worldwide. They say the rise observed in the US may be due to increased drug use caused by higher stress levels linked to the global economic downturn."
Really? I have a tough time buying the argument that stressed-out, possibly unemployed, workers are going to turn to one of the most expensive illicit drugs on the market.
How did the debate over US healthcare descend into crazy rumours about "death panels" and bizarre rants about Britain's "socialised" medicine?
It wasn't meant to be like this. In June, the New Yorker ran a superb piece on US healthcare. It described how doctors are using tests and treatments that have not shown to be effective, in part because they are paid every time they do so. The article is said have become "required reading" in the White House.
Researchers looked at 166 sites around the world where treelines have been tracked since 1900. Treelines advanced at 87 of the sites, stayed where they were at 77, and moved downwards at 2 (there're always one or two awkward ones, aren't there).
This is a bit surprising, given that 111 of the sites showed increases
in mean annual temperature. What was wrong with some of the sites that
kept the trees from moving up the slopes?
The Pentagon has trained its sights on its greatest enemy yet: climate change.
The New York Times reports military experts as saying that "climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilise entire regions".
What's more, the resulting food and water shortages could "demand an American humanitarian relief or military response". You've got to hope that they choose carefully between the two.
Startling news from a government that has been criticised for not doing enough to combat rising carbon dioxide levels. But is it really the first time the US government has taken a "serious look at the national security implications of climate change", as the NYT so boldly claims?
Pitcher, who somehow missed the fact that our feature was specifically about the human body, lists some questions he'd like the answers to - although most of them are obviously jokes (unless the Arsenal football team's current inability to win anything is really the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything).
Here (with links to our archive features) are our answers to the others:
Who cares whether human's closest ancestor were chimpanzees or orang-utans, The Daily Show's John Oliver asks in an amusing segment that aired last night.
We shouldn't need to remind New Scientist readers that overwhelming evidence suggests that humans and chimps last shared a common ancestor roughly 6 million years ago, and with orangs another 10 million or so years earlier.
Our features editor Graham Lawton recently covered a paper that makes the controversial claim that orang-utans are our closest living relatives. He had no trouble finding unconvinced researchers: "Human evolution and phylogenomics researchers have so far given the paper a rough reception. Some declined to comment on it, saying they did not want to dignify the paper. One described it as 'preposterous nonsense' and another as 'loopy'."
The Daily Show pits one such sceptic against Jeffrey Schwartz, the University of Pittsburgh researcher who came up with the theory. Towards the end of the clip, Oliver asks the sceptic to come up with a "scientific 'yo mama' snap" against Schwartz – the response is hilarious.
I wrote yesterday about the competition to write software smart enough to play a version of Super Mario Bros. And today you can see one of the entrants in action. Below is a video of an AI Mario developed by PhD student Robin Baumgarten at Imperial College London.
I like the way you can see how his program is always planning to make the largest possible forward leap (indicated by the red line) and revising that plan as new obstacles or enemies appear.
Anti-vivisectionists in Austria are thought to be behind a string of attacks on the Swiss-based pharmaceuticals giant Novartis.
In the most recent attack, on Monday in the Austrian town of Bach, activists are believed to have set fire to the holiday home of the company's chief executive officer, Daniel Vasella. A fire accelerant was found at the scene, suggesting it was started deliberately, reports Reuters.
Last week, activists desecrated the graves of Vasella's parents, stealing an urn containing the remains of his mother. That echoes a similar incident in the UK in 2004, when
activists dug up a coffin and stole the remains of a woman whose family
had run a business breeding guinea pigs for research.