There's this researcher named Scott Lukas up in Boston. And there's this fast-growing vine found primarily in the southeastern US called kudzu. And then there's delicious, delicious beer.

So according to this article, Lukas decided to study the effects of kudzu on alcohol or alcohol on kudzu or whatever. How'd he choose those two things? That's what those scientists in Boston do for a living -- they pick two cards out of a Pictionary box and they study the impact of this on that and that on this until eventually they find out something worth 600 words in CNN's "News of the Weird" section.

Lukas' 600 words came after he published the results of his little study in a magazine called Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, which, incidentally, is published by the same folks that brought us Juggs: The World's Dirtiest Tit Mag. Anyway, the crux of his findings is that people who were given kudzu, presumably to ingest in caplet form and not in a chef's salad or to pot and set above the radiator, drank "an average of 1.8 beers per session, compared to 3.5 ... by those who took the placebo."

For those of you that ain't that good at maths without pencil and scrap, that's just over half as many beers per session.

I know what you're thinking. Half as many beers? Doesn't that mean half the chance of getting a half-hearted hand job while half-enthusiastically kissing a halfway decent-looking sophomore Pi Phi and half-listening to "Your Body is a Wonderland?"

No, and put on your thinking caps because this is where the science comes in. To paraphrase Lukas himself, Um, what?

Though he has no actual, like, proof, Lukas speculates that the kudzu increased the rate of alcohol absorption into the body, meaning that those subjects who took it felt the alcohol faster. "Rapid infusion of alcohol is satisfying them and taking away their desire for more drinks," Lukas said. "That's only a theory. It's the best we've got so far."

Though Lukas can't seem to figure out what to make of all this, CNN seems pretty eager to suggest that the findings might lead to a way to curb binge drinking.

Now, I don't know about you, but I never thought the problem with binge drinking was that it was creating an alcohol shortage. I was under the impression that the problem was the, like, drunkenness that accompanies the binge drinking. I'm not entirely sure how creating a pill or alcohol additive that reduces the number of drinks required to blackout and show a strange girl your balls would help that, but I'm certainly willing to examine the issue further.

That is to say, I've got the time and the balls if you've got the kudzu and beer.

Analogcabin @ 9:38 AM
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