Culture

Swedes drink less and less alcohol while at the same time the Swedish Alcohol Retail Monopoly's salesare rising and statistics from Statistics Sweden show that alcohol consumption is on the increase. Thishas been the trend for a long period of time. Statistics from the Centre for Social Research on Alcoholand Drugs, SoRAD, show that alcohol consumption fell continuously in the period from 2004 to 2009,whereas the Swedish Alcohol Retail Monopoly's sales rose by 22% over the same period.

It is well known that pain is a highly subjective experience. We each have a pain threshold, but this can vary depending on distractions and mood. A paper in the International Journal of Behavioural and Healthcare Research offers a cautionary note on measuring perceived pain in research.

Persistence paid off for a University of Alberta paleontology researcher, who after months of pondering the origins of a fossilized jaw bone, finally identified it as a new species of pterosaur, a flying reptile that lived 70 million years ago.

Victoria Arbour says she was stumped when the small piece of jaw bone was first pulled out of of a fossil storage cabinet in the U of A's paleontology department.

"It could have been from a dinosaur, a fish or a marine reptile," said Arbour. "

Researchers at the University of Warwick's Centre for Fusion Space and Astrophysics and the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, may have found a way to channel the flux and fury of a nuclear fusion plasma into a means to help sustain the electric current needed to contain that very same fusion plasma.

The researchers used large scale computer simulations to confirm a longstanding prediction by US researchers that high energy alpha particles born in fusion reactions will be key to generating fusion power in the next planned generation of tokamaks.

January 6, 2010 -- Nearly 10 years after the greatest human-made disaster in U.S. history-- the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers -- there has been little research documenting the attacks' consequences among those most directly affected -- the survivors who escaped the World Trade Center towers.

When interviewed by the BBC, the now retired BP boss Tony Hayward admitted to his company's insufficient response to the Deepwater Horizon rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico. Could the company have been better prepared for what turned out to be one of the biggest oil disasters in history?