alcohol

Maybe spring break isn't totally ruined but the Panama City Beach City Council has just voted to ban alcohol consumption during the month of March in 2016. That does put a damper on one of the most popular activities of the college spring break season. Those in favor of the ban argue that the money brought in by spring breakers does not outweigh the the overall negative impact of the month of drunken chaos that comes with them. The ban is meant to discourage wild spring breakers in an effort to bring in other types of tourists, like families, who will spend more money and cause less damage. 

Thanks to a rare bacteria that grows only on rocks in the Swiss Alps, researchers at The Univ. of Texas at Austin and the Pasteur Institute have been the first to identify how alcohol might affect key brain proteins.

In the study, people with one version of a bitterness taste receptor gene said they found an alcoholic drink to be less bitter-tasting than those with a different version of the gene, according to the findings published today (Sept. 23) in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

"The two genes, that had been previously associated with [alcohol] intake, also associated with differences in the perception of ethanol," said study author Dr. John E. Hayes, of the Sensory Evaluation Center at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "The reason this work is significant is because it fills in this gap, because no one had shown in the lab that the alcohol actually tastes differently depending on which [version of the gene] you have."