binge drinking

Drinking games, keg parties, waking up in somebody else’s bed (somewhat you don’t recognize). Ahhh....adulthood? These images used to conjure up memories of those infamous college years, but according to a new study, it's people in the post-college years who are partying the hardest. Collectively, these young adults are called "Cyber Millennials" and they are generally affluent, highly educated, and live in urban areas. Perhaps most surprisingly, they’re also some of the most health-conscious people in the country.

The cliche goes that women spend hours, weeks, years, even entire lifetimes trying to figure out how to land a man. Well, there's one item every lady looking to impress a fellow can cross off her list: Drinking. As drinking becomes the pastime of choice across college campuses, many women have started trying to match their male counterparts drink for drink in an effort to make an impression. An impression she might make, but a new study shows it isn't a good one.

Ed note: This story turned out to be a hoax, but it's still pretty darn entertaining. Today the AP posted a correction stating that Paris Hilton never made any comments about helping drunken elephants. Makes you wonder how the story hit the wires in the first place. Just goes to show you can't believe everything you read.

Paris Hilton was applauded by conservationists today for lending her celebrity to a truly important cause: binge-drinking elephants. Hiltons involvement comes on the heels of an incident in north-eastern India last month when 40 elephants broke into a farm, slurped up an extremely-strong batch of home-brewed rice beer and went berserk, knocking over electrical pylons and electrocuting six of the pachyderms in the process. "The elephants get drunk all the time. It is becoming really dangerous. We need to stop making alcohol available to them," the heiress was quoted saying. (The same could be said for Paris former BFF Britney Spears.)

Whether she intended to or not, Hiltons point highlights a greater conservation concern for elephants, said Soumyadeep Dutta, who heads Nature's Beckon, a regional conservation group. Elephants, drunk or not, are becoming a greater risk to humans (and vice versa) in rural areas such as north-eastern India, where people are rapidly transforming elephants forest habitat into farmland. This has cut into the beasts food supply and, in the last few years, increased the chance of villagers running into a herd of hungry animals.—Bjorn Carey