jtotheizzoe:

Awesomely funny list of things that you already pretty much figured were true but we decided to spend money researching anyway. Hey, we have a glut of PhD students to keep busy!

Highlights:

• Drinking increases the likelihood of unsafe sex
• Smoking pot and driving isn’t safe
• Shoppers don’t read nutrition labels
• People aren’t really doing anything on the internet

(via Scientific American)

Believe it or not, this stuff is actually valuable.  There are a LOT of things that “everyone knows.”  However, these factoids are not proper science, and cannot be quoted in a research paper unless someone really does the numbers on them.  It’s all well and good to say “drinking makes people stupid,” but unless you have the facts on exactly why, and just how stupid it makes them, you come up with a respectable hypothesis about how to reduce the effects of said stupidity.