Writing in The Conversation, Spear describes the exact feeling a lot of us experience in the gauntlet of massive holiday meals that end every year. Specifically, she examines them through the lens of the Japanese word “betsubara,” or “separate stomach.”

The Japanese have not discovered a second cow-like stomach in humans. The term is a silly colloquial way of describing the sudden and seemingly inexplicable desire to find room for dessert when there previously was no room for anything else. The sensation is real, Spear argues, but there’s nothing especially fascinating going on in our stomachs that makes room for sweet treats.

While our stomachs find a way to accommodate any desserts we put in them, our brains play a bigger role than you’d think.

The human stomach isn’t a rigid container that hits max capacity when it fills to the brim. It’s kind of elastic-y. When you eat, it relaxes through a process called gastric accommodation and expands without dramatically increasing pressure. Dessert is usually soft and mushy, low on fiber and protein, so it doesn’t take up a whole lot of space and doesn’t require much mechanical effort to digest. Ice cream is easier to make room for than a second steak, for instance.

Hunger doesn’t shut off once you’re physically full. What takes over is “hedonic hunger,” the urge to eat for pleasure rather than necessity. This is where your brain takes over. Desserts activate the brain’s reward system, releasing dopamine and temporarily quieting signals that tell your stomach you’ve had enough.

You may not need dessert, but your brain wants it — and it will perform all the complicated mental gymnastics necessary to convince you that it’s not just a good idea, but the best idea.

As you eat one type of food, your brain gradually finds it less rewarding. Switching to something sweet or creamy or both refreshes that response. That’s why someone who can’t finish their main course might still be able to find a little room for dessert. Their bellies may not be full, exactly, but they may be experiencing a kind of overstuffed sensory response that needs a little novelty to reset interest.

Fullness signals from hormones like GLP-1 and peptide YY take 20 to 40 minutes to fully kick in. Dessert decisions often happen before that system has caught up. Restaurants know this instinctively, offering menus while our natural reward system can still be exploited. Add cultural aspects, like how dessert is often seen as a celebratory act or part of a ritual, and then toss in a little bit of emotional eating when we need a sugary pick-me-up, and it’s easy to understand why, especially during the holidays, there’s always room for dessert.

The post Humans Have Grown a ‘Second Stomach’ Just for Desserts, Scientist Says appeared first on VICE.

In an email sent to students tonight the university wrote, “If the debt remains outstanding and overdue for payment on the 26th November, the University will use some, or all, of the December 2nd instalment of your bursary to offset any outstanding amounts.”

At Bristol, bursaries are awarded to students who have a household income of £42,875 or less. Terms and conditions of the bursary state that, “The university reserves the right to use bursary instalments to offset any debt you owe to the university.”

Josephina Nagler-Gomez, a first-year student who receives a bursary, told VICE World News, “It’s a complete slap in the face. If you’re eligible for a bursary it’s because you’re from a low-income background and you’re deemed to need extra support. Once again the university has shown that it values money and only money over the well-being of its students.”

“They are targeting some of the most vulnerable students in their care,” she added. “It’s disgusting.”

Nagler-Gomez says she will continue taking part in the rent strike, saying, “I am not going to pay [and] I will not be bullied into paying. I am an 18-year-old student, not a money-making machine.”

Read Next

Fed Up Bristol Students Are Refusing to Pay the University Rent

Students at the University of Bristol have been rent-striking since the beginning of term after multiple coronavirus outbreaks and complaints over the standard of online learning. Students say they have been in negotiation with university management about rent reductions, no penalty contract releases and deposit refunds for international students, and that their demands are to be presented to the Board of Trustees for consideration. 

A spokesperson from the University of Bristol said, “Bursaries are provided by the university to help ​students cover expenditure such as rent. The terms and conditions of bursaries clearly state that if a student owes the university money then the bursary will be used to pay any debt that is owed.”

“We have had regular discussions with Bristol Cut the Rent and the Students’ Union, during which we have been clear that students must comply with the tenancy agreements they have signed,” they added. “It is costing significantly more to operate our halls this year, due to later arrival dates, increased security and the additional support offered to students who are self-isolating, who we are providing with cleaning supplies, laundry services and free food boxes. We do not make a profit from student rent.”

The post A University Says It Will Take Unpaid Rent Out of Student Bursaries appeared first on VICE.

Although political theorists have long considered democratic governments to be among the most stable forms of governance, new research by an international team of complex systems theorists that analyzes how democracies become destabilized suggests that the stability of democratic governments has been taken for granted. As detailed in a paper published this week in the European Journal of Physics, Wiesner and an international team of mathematicians, psychologists, political theorists, and philosophers focused on two features of complex social systems—feedback loops and stability—to better understand why democracies around the world are backsliding.

“Times have changed,” Karoline Wiesner, a mathematician at the University of Bristol and the lead author of the new study said in a statement. “Citizens of democracies are becoming less content with their institutions. They are increasingly willing to ditch institutions and norms that have been central to democracy. They are more attracted to alternative, even autocratic regime types.”

When the researchers entered “threat to democracy” in the media search engine Factiva they found just over 1,500 articles mentioning including that phrase between 1970 and 2010. By comparison, between 2010 and the present, there were over 1,700 articles containing the same phrase. According to the researchers this indicates that there is a widespread public perception that democracies around the world are backsliding.

More objective measures also add weight to this perception. The Freedom House democracy index, for example, measures the strength of democracies around the world according to a rubric that takes into account things like free and fair elections, a free press, and civil liberties. According to Freedom House, almost twice as many countries registered a decline in these democratic markers this year compared to the number of countries that saw an increase in democratic principles. This marked the twelfth consecutive year that the nonprofit saw a global decline in democracy.

But what Wiesner and her collaborators wanted to understand was the socio-economic and political mechanisms that are driving this democratic decline.

Their research shows how feedback loops are intimately connected to the health of democratic institutions. For example, the researchers found that economic inequality and a healthy democracy are closely linked. In cases where economic inequality vastly increases between a society’s wealthiest and poorest—such as after the 2008 financial collapse—democracy also suffers.

“This is because democracy presupposes a basic equality of influence,” Wiesner and her colleagues wrote. “But when economic inequality increases, so do differences in influence over institutions. Those who have large financial resources can better influence institutional change than those who do not. A shock increase in economic inequality leads to corrosion of the relationship between less well-off voters’ choices and institutional outcomes. It may even lead to effective or actual non-democratic rule.”

Yet it’s not just economic factors that contribute to the erosion of democracy. The researchers also found that having a population with too diverse of opinions can also destabilize a healthy democracy. The negative effects an extremely diverse population are also compounded by radicalization and polarization. The former can be characterized as political actions that bend or break longstanding norms and the latter is best understood as the breakdown of collective faith. In other words, polarization can lead to autocratic leaders because polarized constituents may believe it is better to let democracy wither than have their opponent in power.

The researchers attribute this in part to news organizations in countries like the United States where the media is less regulated than, say, Russia.

“Talk radio and Fox News have long catered to a conservative constituency hungry for information and perspectives that confirm its beliefs,” the researchers wrote. “This creates a feedback loop fed by commercial imperatives between the media and its listeners. In fact, they and their listeners and viewers created an entire mythological universe, in which Barack Obama was collaborating with internationalists to take away guns from conservatives.”

Moreover, the researchers noted that partisan competition and “the need to support or thwart policy goals” also create feedback loops between media and political actors. They point to climate change, which has become a “banner of partisan identity thanks to a the combination of conservative media and pseudo-scientific think tanks” as a prime example of this sort of feedback loop.

Finally, the researchers found that the erosion of widely held social norms can also significantly contribute to the breakdown of a healthy democracy. They argue that this is fueled in no small part today by social media.

“Extreme views can move into the mainstream when they are legitimised by actual or presumed majority endorsement,” Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol said in a statement. “The fact that any opinion, no matter how absurd, will be shared by at least some of the more than one billion Facebook users worldwide creates an opportunity for the emergence of a false consensus effect around any fringe opinion, because the social signal is distorted by global interconnectivity.”

Read More: Society is Too Complicated to Have a President, According to Complex Mathematics

The role played by social media in the breakdown of democracy is compounded by the fact that political players can use the massive amounts of data about users to craft specially targeted messages that exploit individual voters’ specific fears or opinions. Indeed, Cambridge Analytica famously sold Facebook user data to political campaigns that was used to influence elections in the United States as well as the “Brexit” referendum in the UK.

“A stabilising feature of a democratic system—opinion exchange—breaks down when this possibility for engagement and debate is destroyed because messages are disseminated in secret, targeting individuals based on their personal vulnerabilities to persuasion, without their knowledge and without the opponent being able to rebut any of those arguments,” Wiesner said. “These impacts of social media on public discourse show how democracies can be vulnerable in ways against which institutional structures and historical traditions offer little protection.”

The post Complex Systems Theorists Explain Why Democracy Is Dying appeared first on VICE.

Using these techniques in patients is still a long ways off. But a new study out of the University of Bristol in the UK, published in Physical Review Letters on Monday, suggests it can be done. The researchers outline a novel method for levitating objects with sound. A press release calls them “rapidly fluctuating acoustic vortices,” similar to “tornadoes of sound,” where a loud sound surrounds a silent core. An object can levitate in the center.

Using sound at an ultrasonic pitch the human ear can’t detect, the researchers were able to levitate a two-centimetre polystyrene sphere using this method. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the most anyone’s made float so far.

“For me, the excitement comes from going beyond what was thought to be a fundamental limit of acoustic trapping,” lead researcher and University of Bristol computer scientist Asier Marzo told me in an email. “Previously, no matter how much power you were using, the trapped particles could never be larger than the wavelength. It is not about absolute sizes but about the relative size of the particle compared to the wavelength.”

In theory, this makes it scalable to larger objects, or smaller ones—like microsurgical implements. Now that scientists can trap particles in a beam that are larger than the wavelength, they’ll be able to manipulate particles using the same frequency. “This would allow doctors to integrate imaging and manipulation in the same ultrasonic machine for instance to locate and move kidney stones or eye floaters,” Marzo said.

The post Doctors Could Someday Use Tractor Beams to Get Those Tiny Floaters Out of Your Eyes appeared first on VICE.

To solve this accessibility problem, volcanologists are increasingly relying on unmanned drones to capture visuals and measurements from the epic danger zones near erupting volcanoes. Take this footage of two lava-happy Guatemalan volcanoes, released Tuesday by a team of volcanologists and aerospace engineers based jointly at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol.

Guatemalan volcano drone footage. Video: Cambridge University/YouTube

These shots were filmed above the peaks of Volcán de Fuego and Volcán de Pacaya, from the POV of relatively large fixed-wing drones. The vehicles ventured straight into the plumes of thick gas released by the erupting volcanoes, taking temperature, humidity, and thermal readings on the fly.

Read More: Climate Change Might Be Messing Up Volcanoes’ Planet-Cooling Powers

Though this is not the first drone footage filmed from the volatile environment above volcanoes, the Bristol/Cambridge team plans to build on their findings with a more ambitious expedition later this year. The researchers’ next batch of drones will carry a suite of sophisticated instruments, including a gas analyser, ash sample collectors, atmospheric sensors, and thermal and visual cameras.

“These sensors not only help to understand emissions from volcanoes, they could also be used in the future to help alert local communities of impending eruptions—particularly if the flights can be automated,” said expedition member Emma Liu, a volcanologist from Earth science department at Cambridge, in a statement.

“Drones offer an invaluable solution to the challenges of in-situ sampling and routine monitoring of volcanic emissions, particularly those where the near-vent region is prohibitively hazardous or inaccessible.”

They also produce mesmerizing views of these geologically pyrotechnic dynamoes, including this shot of an active vent buckling under pressure. So thanks, robots, for continually braving spectacles like this one so that we fragile humans don’t have to.

GIF: Cambridge University/YouTube

Subscribe to pluspluspodcast, Motherboard’s new show about the people and machines that are building our future.

The post Watch Scientists Fly a Drone Through a Frickin’ Volcano appeared first on VICE.

But the most bizarre feature on this prehistoric chimaera was its monstrous, gaping mouth. Nestled beneath its head, three rows of teeth circled around a terrifying orifice. Sound like something straight out of science fiction? The researchers who recently described the animal thought so, too.

“The mouth is a spitting image of the Sarlacc from Star Wars,” Jakob Vinther, an earth sciences professor at the University of Bristol, said in a statement.

Sarlacc pit from Return of the Jedi. Screenshot: YouTube

Over the course of multiple digs in Sirius Passet, Greenland, Vinther and four other colleagues found several of these specimens, all completely intact. The researchers realized they had discovered the 520 million-year-old remains of Pambdelurion whittingtoni, an extinct ancestor of modern arthropods, which include insects and crustaceans.

But perhaps most excitingly, the team now believes they have also solved a longstanding mystery about the origins of this real-life Sarlacc mouth.

According to their study, which was published this week in Paleontology, a fossilized mouth called Omnidens (literally meaning “one tooth”) was discovered in Chengjiang, China two decades ago. Unfortunately, the giant mouth was found without a body, so scientists could only speculate what kind of animal belonged to it.

An artist’s rendering of Pambdelurion whittingtoni. Credit: Robert Nicholls, Palaeocreations

In 2006, researchers concluded that Omnidens was a large priapulid, or ocean-dwelling invertebrate like a penis worm, rejecting competing ideas that it belonged to an arthropod or arthropod relative. Still, others suggested the mouth actually existed on Anomalocaris canadensis, a three-foot-long, shrimp-like organism that cruised the Cambrian seas.

Much like fossils themselves, the truth appeared buried by time.

However, Vinther’s newly discovered specimens offer a seemingly logical compromise to this debate. Pambdelurion possessed a mouth almost identical to Omnidens, yet it shared many morphological features with arthropods. Because of this, the study’s authors propose that Pambdelurion was an ancient relative of Anomalocaris, and also shared a common pre-Cambrian ancestor with Omnidens and modern penis worms.

Penis worm. Image: Wikipedia/Shunkina Ksenia

“This solves a mystery for the affinities of this giant mouth and demonstrates that the two previous hypotheses—whether the mouth belongs to Anomalocaris or a penis worm—are not exactly right, but not entirely wrong either,” Vinther said.

All of these species, with the exception of the penis worm, were alive during the Cambrian Period. At this time in evolutionary history, an explosion of unusual species crawled, swam, and wriggled into existence. Between 570 and 530 million years ago, something contributed to a sudden diversification of life, though scientists aren’t sure whether that catalyst was more oxygenated air, the opening up of ecological niches, or some genetic factor that kicked into gear.

Whatever the case, its outpouring resulted in the most unimaginable collection of creatures to ever inhabit Earth.

“It seems as if nowhere was safe back in the Cambrian,” said co-author Fletcher Young in a statement. “No matter whether you lived in the water column or on the seafloor there was a big, ugly beast that would devour you.”

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

The post This Fossil’s Penis Worm Mouth Has Mystified Scientists, Until Now appeared first on VICE.

Two weeks post-Christmas binge, though and the New Year New Me diet isn’t as “fun” nor “achievable” as you told everyone it would be. Isn’t January depressing enough as it is without subjecting yourself to quinoa salad and artichoke juice?

But your cravings for anything fried, carb-loaded, and/or covered in a layer of milk chocolate might not just be down to a lack of willpower. According to a new study from the University of Bristol, humans have evolved to develop an almost unavoidable urge to overeat, especially during winter.

Using computer modelling to predict how much fat animals should store—assuming that natural selection provides a perfect strategy to maintain the healthiest weight—researchers from the university’s College of Life and Environmental Sciences created a model to predict how the amount of fat animals store should respond to food availability and risk of being killed by a predator when foraging.

The model showed that animals, including humans, should have a target body weight—above which they will lose weight and below which will attempt to gain weight. Simulations found that subconscious controls against becoming overweight would be weak and easily overcome by the “immediate rewards of tasty food.”

Hello, leftover Thorntons selection box.

This is because in our past, cave-dwelling days, being overweight did not pose as much of a threat to survival as being underweight. The urge to maintain body fat is even stronger during winter, when food is scarce in the natural world.

Lead author Dr. Andrew Higginson explained: “The model […] predicts animals should gain weight when food is harder to find. All animals, including humans, should show seasonal effects on the urge to gain weight. Storing fat is an insurance against the risk of failing to find food, which for pre-industrial humans was most likely in winter.”

In other words, it’s not your fault you only made it to day two of the Sirtfood diet.

The study also disproves the “drifty gene” hypothesis, which some researchers say explains why certain people become overweight and others do not.

Higginson said: “You would expect evolution to have given us the ability to realise when we have eaten enough but instead, we show little control when faced with artificial food. Because modern food today has so much sugar and flavour, the urge humans have to eat it is greater than any weak evolutionary mechanism which would tell us not to.”

You heard the man. Throw out the gluten free rice cakes, stop looking at the fitspo Instagram accounts you guilt-followed on Boxing Day, and submit yourself to the glorious, gluttonous realities of evolution.

The post Why Your New Year Diet Is Doomed to Fail appeared first on VICE.

The new chip was heralded by the team of researchers from the University of Bristol and the Japanese telecom company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone as a “quantum optics lab-on-a-chip” because it brings together a number of pre-existing quantum experiments on a single device, drastically cutting down the amount of time and resources needed to design and run experiments to test theories about quantum computing. The work is detailed in a report in Science.

“A whole field of research has essentially been put onto a single optical chip that is easily controlled. The implications of the work go beyond the huge resource savings,” said Dr. Anthony Laing, a research fellow at the University of Bristol’s Centre for Quantum Photonics. “Now anybody can run their own experiments with photons, much like they operate any other piece of software on a computer.”

Quantum computing was first postulated by renowned physicist Richard Feynman in 1981 in response to the problem of simulating quantum mechanics on a computer. Quantum mechanics, which deals with interactions between individual atoms and particles, involves so many variables that the amount of memory required by a classical supercomputer to model quantum interactions is basically impossible. While Feynman was not the first to recognize this problem, he was one of the first to propose a solution: rather than model quantum mechanics on a classical computer, why not just make a quantum computer?

“We carried out a year’s worth of experiments in a matter of hours.”

So, in the 30-odd years that have elapsed since Feynman’s original query, the race has been on to realize Feynman’s quantum computer. The stakes are large, with the advent of quantum computing promising to revolutionize everything from cryptography to pharmacology, enabling the design of new drugs, quicker database searches and the modeling of quantum interactions which previously required massive, costly IRL undertakings like the Large Hadron Collider to observe.

While quantum technologies already exist, a quantum computer that outperforms the most powerful classical computers is still years away. The slow pace of development in quantum computing is largely due to just how hard it is to build and execute experiments to test theories about quantum computing, due to the volatile and delicate nature of quantum systems.

The Bristol and Tippon team’s optical chip may have just blown open the doors for the development of a quantum computer however, ushering in a new era for quantum information processing insofar as the device is able to perform experiments “in a matter of hours” that would have previously taken months to design and execute, in addition to performing processes that were simply impossible before.

“This chip is universal for linear optics, meaning that it can implement any conceivable linear optical protocol that is useful for quantum information processing with photons,” Laing told me over email. “No one chip has before demonstrated such disparate protocols as this one.”

The Bristol team from left to right: Chris Sparrow, Chris Harrold, Jacques Carolan, Dr Anthony Laing. Image: University of Bristol

Prior to today, a chip would be fabricated for a specific task, such as a particular quantum logic gate. According to Laing, this new chip is so versatile that it is capable of implementing a linear optical quantum logic gate that hasn’t even been dreamt up yet.

The silicon based optical chip is something of an equivalent to a modern computer’s central processing unit, but rather than having its data encoded as digital bits (either 1 or 0), the linear optical processing unit (LPU) works by encoding qubits (represented by 1, 0 or some superposition of these states) in polarized photons. It can process photons in an infinite variety of different ways in up to six modes, which can be thought of as analogs to channels or optical fibers.

Such optical approaches to quantum information processing carry with them a number of benefits, such as the relative ease with which researchers can maintain entanglement (a state of affairs in which the quantum state of multiple qubits depend on one another) with a photon as opposed to a particle. According to Laing there are also more practical benefits, such as the fact that photons exhibit low noise characteristics, are well isolated from the environment and can take advantage of well-established technology from the telecom industry.

What makes the team’s LPU different from other optical chips is the apparent ease with which the chip can be reprogrammed for use with different experiments. To demonstrate the chip’s versatility the team conducted a number of quantum information protocols, successfully demonstrating tasks which were not previously possible.

“This chip has demonstrated logical operations between quantum bits (qubits) that are basic logical gates in a quantum computer,” Laing said, enumerating the experiments demonstrated by the team on this chip. “It has also demonstrated entangling operations between qubits, which is a basic requirement for a different type of quantum computer, and it demonstrated 100 boson sampling experiments, which is a specialised quantum computing protocol designed to rapidly show that photons in linear optics can perform a task that cannot be matched by regular classical computers.”

The University of Bristol’s unique Quantum in the Cloud program, the first such service to make quantum processing available to the public, plans to add more chips such as this to its service in an effort to make quantum computing more publicly available. Such accessibility is due in large part to the increasing overlap between public and private investment in quantum information technology, which helps explain the partnership between Bristol and Tippon.

According to the researchers, such collaboration across the public-private divide is entirely necessary if the goal is to make a quantum computer possible, a goal that is looking increasingly realistic thanks to advances such as this new optical chip. As Laing put it, “NTT are geniuses at waveguide technology and it makes perfect sense for us to work with them to realise our ideas.”

While Laing acknowledged that he and his team had plenty of work to complete in the lab before this chip will ever see less experimental applications, the successes detailed in the Science paper bode well for the future of the device and the quantum computer it will help to make possible.

Suffice it to say, if quantum computing was in its infancy yesterday, today it may have just hit puberty.

The post ​One Small Optical Chip, One Giant Leap for Quantum Computing appeared first on VICE.

What it was to be young, carefree, and blind to the vagaries of wheat-free quinoa flakes and Instagram-led eating trends. As long as you could cram it in your mouth and still update your Bebo profile, it was a balanced diet, right?

While most of us will have spent an embarrassing percentage of our adolescence munching on anything cheese/salt/sugar-smothered with zero preparation time, for some, the urge to overeat is more than just a phase.

New research from University College London’s (UCL) Institute of Child Health has identified the genetic variations that may cause certain teenagers to binge eat.

Analysing the data of 6000 participants in the University of Bristol’s Children of the 90s birth cohort study when they were aged between 14 and 16, scientists investigated genetic variations associated with higher body mass index and obesity risk to see if they also linked to binge eating.

The results showed that teens with a particular variation in the FTO gene locus (rs1558902), which has been associated with obesity in prior studies, were 20 percent more likely to binge eat.

Despite teen boys’ increased susceptibility to junk food ads, this trait was particularly marked for adolescent girls, who were up to 30 percent more likely to binge eat if they had the gene variation.

Binge eating or the compulsion to overeat large quantities of food, often over a short period of time, impacts around 10 percent of adults and teenagers and is more common among those who are overweight.

Researchers hope the new findings will lead to better understanding of how binge eating develops and assist in the formation of preventative strategies for teens before they become overweight.

Dr Nadia Micali, a senior lecturer at UCL’s Institute for Child Health who led the study explained: “We know variations in the FTO gene can predict binge eating in teenagers, and binge eating, in turn, can predict obesity. Eventually this finding could allow us to develop more targeted treatment for binge eating, and enable much earlier intervention so young people don’t develop obesity.”

Binge eating is often linked to environmental factors but UCL’s research joins studies such as the University of Michigan’s recent exploration of the appetite-regulating gene within POMC cells in analysing the issue from a biological, rather than behavioural standpoint.

And with more than half of the UK population predicted to be obese by 2050, probing our biological predilection for eating stuff that isn’t great for us may be the way forward.

The post Scientists Have Figured Out Why Some Teenagers Binge Eat appeared first on VICE.

This is also good news for people wanting to speed up their booze intake.

In what sounds like the best reason to answer those back-page ads calling for participants in scientific studies, a group of 160 men and women basically went on a free bar crawl at three local pubs, where they downed booze in the name of science. Researchers insisted on taking the group out of the lab and into to the bars to mimic real-world situations as much as possible. After all, not every lab is equipped with dartboards, the lingering smell of chips, and a jukebox that only plays “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

At each of the three bars, the lab rats were split into two groups. One group drank beer from curved glasses marked with volume amounts while the other group drank from unmarked curved glasses. The researchers found the group with the marked glasses took a minute more to finish than the unmarked group.

Another experiment had the groups drinking out of straight glasses and curved glasses, and found that those who drank out of straight glasses also drank slower than the other group.

“It seems it’s more difficult to tell how much you’re drinking from a curved glass,” researcher David Troy told The Daily Mail, adding that the reason for the study was to understand the environmental factors that cause people to overindulge.

“Our research suggests that small changes, such as glass shape and volume markings, can help individuals make more accurate judgments of the volume they are drinking, and hopefully will use this information to drink at a slower pace,” says researcher Angela Attwood.

The results of this study will be presented at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference in Liverpool this week. You just know the attendees will be testing out this theory at the pub next door.

Of course, testing out this theory with just 160 people at three pubs hardly make these findings conclusive, as Troy says the results are preliminary and “need to be treated with caution.”

Still, to play it safe, if you want a beer but want to resist the urge to slam it down for an instant buzz: ask the bartender to serve it in a Pyrex measuring cup. Similarly, bar owners should now only serve booze out of fish bowls to get customers drinking more.

The post Your Curved Pint Glass Might Be Making You Drink Faster appeared first on VICE.