Anyone who has ever taken a shot of hard liquor (tequila, brandy) can tell you: it burns on the way down. But it's not the alcohol itself that's burning your throat. Instead, the ethanol in the liquid is making your throat's VR1 heat receptors (left) more sensitive, prompting them to perceive your own body temperature as hot.

Normally, the VR1 receptors activate at 42° Celsius, but alcohol lowers this threshold to around 34° C, which is 4° C less than your bodies regulated temperature.

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Nearly 80% of U.S. dairy cows have their horns removed each year to protect their handlers and fellow cattle. But the practice, which is both painful and expensive, has come under increasing scrutiny from animal rights activists. Now, science may be coming to the rescue: A group of researchers announced last week that they successfully edited the genomes of dairy cows to make them hornless. The scientists used the transcription activator-like effector nucleases DNA editing technique to introduce a natural allele linked to hornlessness into dairy cow embryos. Five healthy calves were born, all without horns (above, left), the researchers report in a letter in Nature Biotechnology. The allele - called POLLED - is much more common in beef catt ...

According to a new study on human behavior, 90% of the population can be classified into four basic personality types: Optimistic, Pessimistic, Trusting and Envious. However, the latter of the four types, Envious, is the most common, with 30% compared to 20% for each of the other groups.

If you're the type of person who doesn't mind what you achieve, just as long as it's better than everyone else, then you're considered envious. Optimists, which account for 20% of the people tested in the study, are those who believe that they and their partner will make the best choice for both of them. Pessimists were defined in the study as those who selected the option which they see as the lesser of two evils - they accounted for 20% as well. The trusti ...