"student" news and stories

Yep - 50,000. In honor of the holiday, University of Maryland bakery staff took two months to make the confections, which are being stored in various freezers all over the College Park campus.

UMD officials expect about 80,000 people to attend the event today, which is free to the public.

The numbers are unbelievable: the ingredients were $14,000, which were paid for in part by corporate sponsors, and the total calorie count for all 50,000 cakes is a staggering 12.6 million. Take that, Weight Watchers.

Oh - and the photo? Courtesy of rockin' Slashfood Flickr user Cupcakequeen.

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What do you get when you combine hundreds of engineers, a charitable mindset and about a zillion aluminum cans?

You get Canstruction. Each year, major cities across the U.S. raise awareness about hunger by hosting building competitions, which are then deconstructed and distributed to local food pantries and day care and senior centers.

Since 1992, Canstruction has donated ten million pounds of canned food to organizations, and one hundred more competitions are scheduled for this year.

The designs range from an octopus to bowling pins to a lotus blossom, each carefully designed and meticulously constructed. And if you think the hot dog and condiments are cool, check out the gallery for more food-inspired designs.

School administrators want to show their students that he line between right and wrong is hard and fast. They want to make sure that the students know where the boundaries lie and that they will face the consequences for crossing them. Different administrators do this with varying degrees of success and it is the ones who are firm but fair that end up with fewest disciplinary problems and the most respect from their students. The emphasis here should be on the "fair" part of the equation because it is easy to take this too far. A few months ago, we heard about a student who was punished because his father packed too much "junk food" in his lunch. This week, a student was given detention at the Wessex Community School in Cheddar, Somerset, England for "eating [an] apple outside a designated area, which [the headmaster] said was a breach of health and safety regulations." After refusing to attend after school detention on the grounds that the punishment did not fit the crime, the student was threatened with expulsion. All for eating an apple.

The school stands by the headmaster's zero-tolerance approach to rule breaking and has punished students for "not bringing a muffin to a cookery class" and sucking a mint (like an Altoid) while on the playground.

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For his science experiment this year, a middle school student from Boca Raton, Florida decided that he would test the effects of energy drinks on blood sugar. He came up with the idea because the drinks are hugely popular with his friends who feel that the drinks give them a "boost" and was already familiar with blood sugar and testing it because his cousin is a diabetic. Lucas Peel's hypothesis was that the drinks with the greatest amount of sugar and caffeine would produce the greatest increase in blood sugar, giving the drinker a burst of energy.

Over the course of about a week, Lucas drank Red Bull, Rock Star, Amp and water, testing his blood sugar levels twice after each of the three times he tried each drink. He found that, contrary to his original theory, it was "the energy drinks with the least sugar [that] increased blood sugar level." Red Bull boosted blood sugar more than any of the other drinks.

Lucas says that he avoids energy drinks and hopes that his project will help some of his fellow students to realize that they are not a good replacement for a real breakfast.

This isn't the first time that a middle-school student has conducted a science project that attracts a far-ranging interest. Earlier this year, for example, a student in Tampa, FL tested samples of water from the toilets at fast food restaurants and compared it to the ice from the soda machines, only to discover that there were more bacteria in the soda machine than the toilet.

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A group of Swedish university students is taking part in a study that is recreating Morgan Spurlock's fast food experiment, Super Size Me, in laboratory conditions. Under the supervision of professor Fredrik Nyström, two groups of young medical school students are stuffing themselves with fast foods and avoiding exercise. All of the calories they eat must come from fast food, although they are allowed to make breakfast at home so long as it was "bacon-and-eggs based".

Nyström thought it would have been more difficult to find people willing to participate, but the students were more than eager. More men than women applied and the chosen were the most highly motivated, who were likely to stick to the 6,000 calories-a-day diet. All their food throughout the study would be paid for and they were provided with bus passes so they would not have to walk any more than necessary. The only control on the study was that the Swedish ethics board said the participants must be removed from the study if they increased their bodyweight by more than 15%.

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