Tag: ucla

Guns don’t just make your penis look larger

As we’ve already learned today, beer makes you smarter. But, you know what will make you look taller and more muscular, too? Holding a gun.

According to research from UCLA’s Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture, people shown pictures of hands holding guns are more likely to overestimate the height and muscularity of the man holding it by an entire two inches. Meanwhile, hands holding caulk guns and power drills were seen as merely compensatory (hand tools being the Ferraris of the man accoutrement world)  and subtracted inches.

So, pull your piece in public. And, thanks to more states allowing guns in bars, you can show off your juggling skills with your gun, beer and trivia buzzer. (They laughed at you for going to Clown College, but who’s laughing now? Nobody, you big man, you.)

Turns out you CAN put a price on former glory

Pictured: The real man behind the lawsuit.A class action lawsuit filed by former college athletes against the NCAA and Electronic Arts (EA), the former evil empire of video games, focuses on the potential unlawful use of athletes’ likenesses without their consent. The case, filed by former Nebraska and Arizona State quarterback Sam Keller and former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon, is now a couple of years old, but the judge has already said that if rights were violated, EA could be paying big damages.

How big? Try a quarter of EA’s annual revenue, or approximately $1 billion. The geniuses at USA Today did some fancy math, but to boil it down, it comes out to the law saying that the players can get $1,000 a likeness. Add up all the players (3,630), games, and then triple it thanks to a statute that says that it can be trebled if the violation was “knowing, willful or intentional,” and you’ve got about $1 billion that EA could have to shell out.

EA has argued that it has a First Amendment right to use the players likenesses. They just might need all of the amendments and then some.

Get ready for a boom in spit cosmetics

Scientists have discovered a process that enables them to guess people’s age within five years based on their saliva. This method could revolutionize forensics because now criminologists won’t have to saw the bodies in half and count the rings.

But, the real story is one that was briefly mentioned and that we’re still waiting for: what the researchers were doing when they figured this out.

“[Dr. Eric] Vilain and his team, whose findings are reported in the online edition of the Public Library of Science One journal, made the discovery while studying 34 pairs of identical male twins with different sexual orientations” [emphasis ours].

Now that’s how you tease for grants and donors.

Between the Rock and a hard drink

UCLA archaeologists uncovered the world’s oldest winery, stretching humanity’s history with crunk juice all the way back to 4000 BC now. The ancient Armenian wine was believed to be used for funerals, usually held daily between 5 and 8 pm. It is believed to have evolved into “Happy Hour” once hygiene was invented.

But, that’s not the real story.

Every so often, the real story gets buried in the later paragraphs. Say, story, what was the oldest use of grape seeds before this discovery?

“The oldest previous evidence of grape seeds and other organic materials dates to around 3150 BC and was found in the tomb of the Egyptian king Scorpion I.”

That’s right: there really was a Scorpion King. And here we thought that was the most ridiculous of all the Mummy films.

Animal Liberation Front has AIDS

While we’re not ones to hand out free tips to species traitors like the Animal Liberation Front, we can’t gloat without doing so.

So, if your plan is to intimidate an animal researcher, the last thing you want to do is mail him razor blades and claim they’re infected with AIDS.

1. He conducts medical research on animals. Which means he can easily test whether the razors actually carry the HIV virus by using it on the monkeys.

2. The medical research is for addictive drugs. You might as well mail him pocket mirrors and rolled up dollar bills for the cocaine wing, which is filled with a hundred monkeys at a hundred typewriters who have already developed scripts for 12 Two and a Half Men clones.