Better booze coming: "It could be the perfect tipple: a drink that makes you merry without turning you into a slurring, stumbling liability on course for the mother of all hangovers. If drinks containing PAs, or partial agonists, become a hit it could save many lives, as well as countless scenes of drunken embarrassment, according to the scientist who devised them. PAs mimic the popular effects of alcohol, but not the least popular. Although at the proposal stage, drinks using PAs could be produced with existing technology. A professor of psychopharmacology at Bristol University in England, David Nutt, said although alcohol made people feel sociable, it had the all-too-familiar side-effects of impairing senses, ruining co-ordination, making us aggressive, and harming our livers, hearts and brains. Advances in pharmacology mean that scientists are able to unravel the complex neurological responses to alcohol and find which reactions lead to positive, enjoyable effects. According to New Scientist magazine, PAs produce only the desirable effects of alcohol".


Pill-loving burglar dies: "An intruder has been found dead and naked in the house he broke into after apparently overdosing on prescription drugs he had found inside. The 60-year-old resident of an Adelaide property found the body yesterday after being away for two days. Police said the dead man appeared to have taken the resident's diabetes tablets, vomited in the toilet and then used the shower before collapsing. Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Kimber, of Elizabeth, said the intruder, aged in his 20s, had been known to police. "It appears he climbed in through the roof. There were tiles smashed and broken and he has got in through the kitchen ceiling," he said. "I can't speculate how long the man had been in the house but it appears he has been dead between 12 and 24 hours."


Windy beans no myth: "It's a "factual reality" that beans make you break wind, South Africa's advertising watchdog has revealed. A TV advertisement for sweet onions showed a rugby player eating beans that made him smell "stinky." The ad claims that "with sweet onions there are no tears, no burn and definitely no stink". The country's Dry Bean Producers Organisation complained about the ad on the basis that the "stinky" charge was untrue, but the Advertising Standards Authority threw out the charge and said it was widely known that beans produce gas. "It plays on an objectively determinable factual reality which cannot be denied," the ASA said on its website."