"students" news and stories

Image: stubandherbsbar.com

A weekly look at the draft selection in beer-friendly bars across the country.

The passing of Labor Day means back-to-school season is officially here. Many college students have already landed on campus. Hopefully, they have a bar like Stub & Herbs to help them lament the end of their summer vacation.

Located at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Stub & Herbs is a campus icon, opened way back in 1939 with the plan to serve great burgers and drinks. Though their cheeseburgers are still a staple, a lot has changed in the drinks department, especially recently.

"Over the last two years, I got creative freedom to pick whatever we wanted," says general manager Jon Landers. "Our taps are now 100 percent all-American craft beer." He pushed college standbys like Coors Light and Bud Light onto the bottles list and began using their 32 taps to focus on independent breweries, especially local and "blossoming" ones. "The Midwest has a reason to be proud," Landers continues. "They're turning out some great stuff."

Have a great beer bar at your school or alma mater? Fill us in in the comments! And see Stub & Herbs' complete draft list, as of Tuesday, after the jump. ...

Last Friday, students at CalTech put away their high tech pursuits and joined forces to harvest all the olives that grow on the school's 130 olive trees. This is the second year they've been picking the olives and the first year that they school went all out to throw a campus-wide harvest festival, complete with three-course family style Italian meal.

It got started last year when the university president spotted two students picking some of the olives. He promised them a home cooked meal if they could devise a way of making oil from the olives. They came up with a mechanism and the campus interest grew. The rest, as they say, is history. For those of you live in the area and want to try out some of the CalTech olive oil, it will be available in their bookstore in about three weeks.

[via Metafilter]

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Have you ever seen someone using a fork, knife or another eating utensil in a way that seems incredibly awkward? Because the ability to use a knife and fork is a mark of a well-socialized individual and is a skill that is typically picked up from observing others, it is hard not to wonder they picked up such unusual habits. In Japan, some schools are wondering the same thing and want to make sure that such sloppy, untraditional habits of chopstick use are stopped before they spread any further. The Hisatagakuen Sasebo Girls' High School will be testing students on their skill with chopsticks as part of their entrance examinations. The 10-minute test will require that students "transfer beads, marbles, dice and beans from one plate to another."

Administrators say that the purpose of this test is to show respect for "the Japanese spirit" but, in light of the decline of chopstick use among Japanese children, it also seems like a rather unusual way to make sure everyone has good table manners.

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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 new study conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in conjunction with the University of California, Davis, has uncovered a difference in the way that the eating habits of men and women are impacted by body image.

When shown images of "ideal-bodied people" of their own gender, young men and women often changed their eating habits depending on how they perceived their own body in relation to the image shown. If they were insecure about their bodies, some women would eat less after seeing the image, while some men would eat more. The food used in the study was pretzels, which the participants were given free access to during another activity.

The body images that the women saw were taken from magazines like Cosmo, Vogue, Shape and Elle. The men's images came from fitness magazines, including Men's Health, Men's Fitness and Muscle & Fitness. The participants were all of average build.

The question that remains is what effect viewing these images has in the long run and whether it contributes to the development of eating disorders.

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