All Posts Tagged With: "beer"
Cheers to the Science Pub
Café lectures trend grows
The University of Regina is offering free general interest lectures served alongside pints of beer.
It’s part of a growing trend in university towns where students are proving they’re interested in learning for the sake of learning—so long as they can simultaneously eat snacks and drink beer.
The Science Pub series was created by Bev Robertson, a professor emeritus who now owns the Bushwakker Brewpub where the monthly event is held. He told the Leader-Post that he got the idea after hearing about similar events further west.
Want to get paid to drink?
It’s all in the name of research
Photo courtesy of Kirti Poddar on Flickr
Students at Arizona State University are getting paid to drink — $60 per night.
Will Corbin, an Arizona State University professor researches the effects of alcohol by getting students drunk. “‘The biggest thing I get is, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he told azcentral.com. “You have a bar, and you give people alcohol as part of your research.’
That’s right. He has a bar in the psychology building where carefully screened students are plied with cocktails by research assistants each night at 5 p.m. They’re given three drinks in the first half hour. Then they’re put through a battery of tests related to memory or potentially risky behviour.
After they’ve sobered up, they’re allowed to leave. That typically happens around 9 p.m. — early enough to make it to a real bar.
Two new things you should know about drinking
Study shows brain damage, but that’s not all
Another study suggests that binge drinking damages the brain. But this time, there’s reason to be hopeful too.
Tim McQueeny, a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati (UC), looked at 29 high-resolution brain scans from students aged 18 to 25. Those who reported regularly consuming more than four to five drinks at a time had more thinning of the pre-frontal cortex, which is the area where executive decisions are made. Executive decisions include paying attention and keeping control of emotions — things that become difficult when intoxicated.
“Alcohol might be neurotoxic to the neuron cells, or, since the brain is developing in one’s 20s, it could be interacting with developmental factors and possibly altering the ways in which the brain is still growing,” warns McQueeny.
However, his adviser and co-author Krista Lisdahl Medina also had some hopeful news. Their preliminary data also show that grey matter appears to be fine in those who were once binge drinkers, but who have since abstained. That, she says, warrants further study.
The prevalence of binge drinking on North American campuses is undeniable. In the most recent National College Health Assessment, which surveyed 30,000 students, nearly one in three reported that they consumed at least five standard drinks the last time they went to a party or socialized. Five per cent of them reported having more than 11 drinks the last time they socialized.
Energy drinks may double alcohol consumption
Study suggests cause may be social or physiological factors
According to several Dalhousie researchers, combining caffeinated energy drinks and alcohol could be a major health hazard. The study, which was published in Drug and Alcohol Review, showed that energy drink consumption leads to twice the amount of alcohol consumption.
Dr. Sean Barrett, associate professor of psychology and psychiatry at Dalhousie and one of the researchers involved in the study, says that further research must be conducted to determine exactly why energy drinks increase alcohol consumption. He suggests that caffeine or an amino acid called taurine might be culprits.
“But what we do know that when alcohol is used together with these energy drinks, people say they feel more sober but they still tend to perform poorly on various neurocognitive tasks. They’re still physically intoxicated, they just feel like they aren’t,” said Dr. Barrett in an interview with Dal News.
Whether the cause is social behavior or dopamine release from the brain, the article points out that the increased alcohol intake raises the risk of alcohol poisoning and risk-taking behaviours.
-Photo courtesy of Tambako the Jaguar
March of the Engineers
This is a story about love. Not just any love. A love of… beer.
This is a story about love. Not just any love. A love of… beer.
