Unhappy with merely drinking their expensive spirit, meddling scientists have found a way to turn tequila into diamonds.

The final diamond film was hard and heat-resistant - properties that could make the diamond useful as coatings for cutting tools, high-power semiconductors, radiation detectors and optical-electronic devices, the scientists explained. They plan to begin industrial-scale applications around 2011, and hope to interest a tequila producer in widening its market beyond the traditional beverage.

No word on what brand makes for the highest-quality tequila diamonds.

Unscrupulous manufacturers are apparently using radioactive waste in consumer products, and hiding the junk in old beer containers:

Abandoned medical scanners, food processing devices and mining equipment containing radioactive metals such as cesium-137 and cobalt-60 are often picked up by scrap collectors and sold to recyclers, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear arm. De Bruin said he sometimes finds such items hidden inside beer kegs and lead pipes to prevent detection.

The waste is being used, they say, in items including “purses, cutlery, sinks and hand tools.” But it’s the beer kegs that have us sweating…

Red wine gets all the press, what with its anti-aging miracle compound. But what about that poor sod, the beer drinker? He’s left out in the cold to get a pot belly and enormous intestinal gas.

The genius kids at Rice University want to change that: They’re putting resveratrol, that red wine magic juice, into a brew they call BioBeer. Says one of the students working on the project:

“It’s not going to prevent you from getting a beer gut from drinking too much beer, or from getting cirrhosis of the liver,” says Taylor Stevenson, one of six undergraduates working on the project. “But people are already drinking beer, so why not make the activity a little healthier?”

Mmmmm. cirrhosis.

You’ll start seeing these $5,000 computer-equipped tables at upscale bars (and, especially, Vegas) in the near future. Called Microsoft Surface tables, they’re nifty novelties with so-far questionable utility: Most applications I’ve seen for it focus on time-wasting games for bored people and trying to get you to buy music for the Zune MP3 player that you don’t have.

Now it looks like the bars will be getting a way to try to recoup some of that five grand, by using the tables to do some real work: Getting their customers to drink more. Check out the video below to see the table’s “level sensing glassware research,” in which a light beam measures how much liquid is left in your glass and alerts a waiter at just the right moment when you’re most likely to order a refill… when the glass is almost, but not completely, empty.

Better yet: Forget the waiter! Surface can sell you a refill right there on the spot! Now all we need is hydraulic spigots that rise from the table and refresh your martini without us pathetic humans to intervene at all.

Men’s Health outlines some excellent choices for cutting down on calories and fat while dining out and in — and they also include drinking options, including beer and cocktails.

“Healthiest” beer: Beck’s Premier Light (64 calories, 4 grams of carbs) — and Guinness Draught isn’t bad at 126 calories, 10 grams of carbs…
Worst for you: Sam Adams Cream Stout (190 calories, 24 grams of carbs)

As for cocktails, everyone knows the healthy way to drink is to go for the Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver.

A surprisingly bad choice: The Margarita. When made with the omnipresent margarita mix, each glass will set you back a whopping 500 calories (and 32 grams of carbs). Make it fresh if you want something remotely healthy — not to mention drinkable.

A fascinating piece in the latest Malt Advocate (Q4 2008, page 18) still has me reeling and thunderstruck. It concerns efforts to thwart evaporation of whiskey, a natural part of the aging process. Evaporation is a huge expense for distillers: Conventional wisdom holds that 2 percent of a cask vanishes each year as it evaporates. This is known as “the angel’s share,” for obvious reasons, and it’s been a respected part of whiskey making since the start.

Now the solution. In a nutshell, Diageo says it is experimenting with, well, wrapping wooden casks in plastic wrap in order to keep the spirits from getting out. Per the story:

At this early stage of the research, the results have “astounded” the researchers, and the taste of the whisky “is not thought to be affected.” The technique is “not proven,” said a Diageo spokesman. “We are continuing our research.”

A warehouse full of plastic-wrapped casks sounds awfully lowbrow (imagine the eyebrows raised on the tour!), but if it really does let producers create twice the amount of whiskey with virtually no extra expense, imagine what it could do for supplies of older whiskeys as well as to prices.

Though I suspect tradition will win out in this research, it’s certainly a trend to keep an eye on. Maybe the future really is “plastics,” even in the booze biz.

I guess I just never really thought about it…

From this piece on PsyBlog:

Lowering the lights signals the real beginning of night-time fun: with dimmed lights and alcohol beginning to work its magic the business of loosening up after the day’s exertions can truly begin.

But turning the music up so loud that people are forced to shout at each other doesn’t have quite the same beneficial effect on social interactions. Because everyone is shouting, the bar becomes even noisier and soon people start to give up trying to communicate and focus on their drinking, meaning more trips to the bar, and more regrets in the morning.

Read the full story for scientific details: When the volume is at 88db, you drink a beer 3 minutes faster than if it’s at 72db.

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry weighs in on the biggest fad in winemaking going today: Biodynamic farming. One assumes by the name that biodynamics must be a good thing… but what does it really mean? The CSI folks dig deeper, outlining something that even includes astrological analysis that is “set against a complex background cosmogony that makes the whole process not unlike a quasi-religious movement.”

From the intriguing (and lengthy) piece:

Steiner’s agricultural lectures are, to put it mildly, not an easy read. They are marked by clear falsehoods, digressions, and odd fantasies. He recommends such techniques as combating parasites “by means of concentration, or the like” (Steiner 2004, p. 84). He says that certain insect pests are spontaneously created by “cosmic influences” (p. 115) and that eating potatoes “is one of the factors that have made men and animals materialistic” (p. 149). He tells us, “most of our illnesses arise” when our “astral body” is “connected more intensely with the physical (or with any one of its organs) than it should normally be” (pp. 116-17). In contrast, “in the true sense of the word a plant cannot be diseased”; plants only appear to be diseased when “Moon-influences in the soil . . . become too strong” (pp. 117-18). He also describes baroque fantasies of a human history that spanned “epochs . . . on the earth when such things were known and applied in the widest sense”6 (p. 120). And on and on, ad nauseam. It is good to keep this material in the back of our minds when considering his forays into agriculture.

Next time you meet a biodynamic winemaker, ask what methods they are using to manipulate the energy fields around the vines! Inquiring minds want to know!

But seriously, of course, many biodynamic wines are great, and I’m sure not all modern biodynamicists (is that a word?) rely on holistic methods in their vineyard management but are genuinely exploring positive environmental policies. Still, the origins of biodynamics is pretty fascinating stuff.

Beam Global sent this curious (and a little bizarre) press release today about the politics of drinking.

Based on a survey of 100 Washington, D.C. area bartenders about the political preference and drinking habits of their patrons, Beam attempted to find out how drinking differs between the parties: “Democrats are seen as better tippers, have better pick-up lines and give better toasts. Republicans heavily outweigh Democrats when it comes to ordering their drink straight up. Parties are at a stalemate over drinking hours, with Republicans edging out for the first to arrive at happy hour and Democrats being the last to go home.”

The full survey results are as follows:

– Who is a better tipper? Democrats 60%, Republicans 38%

– Who is more likely to order a drink straight up? Democrats 14%, Republicans 82%

– Who is more likely to order a fruity (pink) drink? Democrats 58%, Republicans 34%

– Who has the better pick-up lines? Democrats 74%, Republicans 14%

– Who is better at giving a toast? Democrats 63%, Republicans 36%

– Who is more likely to arrive first to happy hour? Democrats 48%, Republicans 50%

– Who is more likely to be the last to go home? Democrats 53%, Republicans 46%

Figures do not total 100% because this is a study done in bar.

Sorry, club kids. This just in, and it’s kind of gross.

According to the latest research, the popular energy drink Red Bull can increase the risk of heart damage. The participants of the study were university students aged between 20 and 24. Researchers found that just one sugar free can of Red Bull raised the level of stickiness of the blood and could lead to the formation of blood clots.

The creators of Red Bull, of course, deny there is anything harmful in those little silver cans and say it has been scientifically tested for safety.

Still, maybe best not to guzzle this stuff by the gallon…