SEATTLE (AP) -- Students who go abroad while in college are likely to increase or even double their alcohol intake while they're away, a new study has found.

Drinking increased most dramatically in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the study by researchers at the University of Washington found. Students reported drinking more when they perceived their fellow travelers were drinking more heavily, and those who planned to make drinking part of their cultural immersion did so.

An unperformed choral work composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams more than 100 years ago will be premiered next year.

The 45-minute piece, called A Cambridge Mass, was discovered during an exhibition at the Cambridge University Library.

Conductor Alan Tongue, who found the piece, said: "I knew immediately that here was a significant work."

Mr Tongue will conduct the concert, which will take place in March.

Compared with what may be in store for the US, George W. Bush's administration looks positively friendly to science, says Chris Mooney

THE Tea Party isn't nearly as entertaining as it ought to be. It is still unclear whether this particular brand of patriotic extremism is a passing fad or something more. Come the US mid-term elections on 2 November, those of us who care about science and rationality may not be laughing.

On the surface, the movement seems impelled by the economic pain Americans are feeling. But look more closely and it's hard to miss what historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style" in US politics, marked by "exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy". An essential strand of that is anti-intellectualism and disdain for science.

The gender gap is narrowing across the globe, with large parts of the world moving towards greater equality between the sexes in terms of pay, education, health and political representation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

Nordic nations, longtime champions of an equal society, topped the list with Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden demonstrating "great equality between men and women" in the forum's Global Gender Gap Index.

Of the countries surveyed, 59% narrowed the gap in the past year. Denmark, the Philippines, the UK and Sri Lanka stayed at the same ranks as in 2009, keeping them in the top 20.

The US peace group "Peace of the Action" has discovered documents showing that it and many other organisations have been under surveillance for many months by a private agency called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR).

Founded by antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, Peace of the Action has focused on opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by pressuring legislators and organising demonstrations and civil disobedience actions at visible places around Washington DC.

According to the ITRR's Web site:

The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR) is an American and Israeli nonprofit corporation created to help organisations succeed and prosper in a world threatened by terrorism.

ITRR's Israeli and American experts provide counter-terrorism training, seminars and security specialisation in dealing with threats such as weapons of mass destruction (WMD), suicide bombers and other forms of international terror striking both the public and private sector.

The revelations about the Philadelphia-based ITRR emerged as part of a scandal involving the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, an office of the Department of Homeland Security, which gave a no-bid $103,000 contract to ITRR to gather information on various community groups.

Experts on brain injury are trying to take what they've learned on the football field and apply it to the battlefield.

That will mean identifying military personnel who have suffered a concussion, and forcing them to rest until their brains have a chance to heal.

The approach is similar to what happens in the NFL -- players who suffer a concussion may be benched for a week or more, even if they object.

Brain injury experts say mandatory rest and evaluation are even more important in combat because of new discoveries about the way energy from an explosion appears to reach the brain and cause damage. The goal is to prevent fighters who have already had one concussion from suffering another while their brain is still especially vulnerable to damage.

A federal judge has issued a nationwide injunction stopping enforcement of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, ending the military's 17-year-old ban on openly gay troops.
 
U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips' landmark ruling Tuesday was widely cheered by gay rights organizations that credited her with getting accomplished what President Obama and Washington politics could not.

... At a rushing mountain river, the linguists crossed on a bamboo raft and entered the tiny village of Kichang. They expected to hear the people speaking Aka, a fairly common tongue in that district. Instead, they heard a language, the linguists said, that sounded as different from Aka as English does from Japanese.

After further investigation, leaders of the research announced last week the discovery of a "hidden" language, known locally as Koro, completely new to the world outside these rural communities. <...>

As Dr. Harrison and Dr. Anderson expanded their research, comparing Koro with several hundred languages, they determined that it belonged to the Tibeto-Burman language family, which includes 400 tongues related to widely used Tibetan and Burmese. But Koro had never been recognized in any surveys of the approximately 150 languages spoken in India. ...