Upping the booze intake is a net win: What happens when a population's alcohol consumption goes up suddenly? Finland was kind enough to do the experiment for us by dropping the tax on booze by roughly a third. Now, researchers have run the numbers in the years following the shift. Alcohol-related deaths do go up among the middle-aged, with the biggest boost coming in women between 50 and 70, where the rate jumped by 40 percent. However, the number of alcohol-induced deaths per month was small, so the total increase is about 7 deaths per 100,000 people a month. That's easily offset by the benefit to the elderly, though, where those over 70 saw a big drop in deaths due to cardiovascular problems.
Blind, living in a cave, and an insomniac, but still dominant: That's dominant genetically. Lots of species that adapt to life in caves avoid burning the energy involved with supporting an eye that will never be used. Mexican cave fish are a great model for studying that, since they evolved from species that are still present on the surface nearby and can interbreed. It turns out the cave populations are insomniacs, at least compared to their surface relatives, and if you breed hybrids, those animals are also insomniacs—low sleep requirements are apparently genetically dominant. The odd thing about this is that different cave populations seem to have a different set of mutations that let them forgo sleep.
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