NY Times writer, Carol Kaseuk Yoon, has written an article about beer consumption and the productivity of scientists. More specifically, Czech ornithologists. (It should be noted that the Czech Republic has the “highest rate of beer consumption on earth.”) Yoon is a science reporter/writer and her page of awesomely titled articles confirms that. Even better? The scientist who found time for this incredibly valuable experiment is named Dr. Grim. How can you get good results with a name like that?

The article reads like something out of Bizarro World. In a nutshell, Dr. Grim wrote a paper stating that beer is to blame for the underachievers in our scientific community. More beer = less published papers. Panic ensued and “the paper has quickly been making the rounds among biologists, provoking reactions like surprise, nervous titters and irritation.”

Nervous titters aside, what if you’re just a bad scientist? What if you’re lazy? Or just plain dumb? Not everyone can be Charles Darwin. We call bullsh*t on this one. And so does this guy. He calls-out Dr. Grim, who “on occasion enjoys more than 12 beers in a night and has only two English publications in the past nine years, so one might conclude that he’s a case study of the suds phenomenon.” The scientist from Discover Magazine ask a valid question: Which is the cause and which the effect?

Now, if that wasn’t enough alcoholic science for you, scientists in Germany say that wine makes your brain shrink. Most studies on alchohol and health have dealt mainly with the heart, blood pressure, and antioxidants, but no one until now has actually done a comparative study on the brain, specifically the hippocampus.

Researchers at the Göttingen University in Germany said that wine drinkers had a smaller hippocampus as compared to beer drinkers. The hippocampus is a vital area of the brain and plays a critical role in memory and spatial awareness.

Reporting in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholics, the researchers revealed that hippocampus in wine drinkers was 10 percent smaller than that of healthy adults. In non-alcoholics, the hippocampus measured 3.85ml, while in wine drinkers it measured just 2.8ml. In contrast beer drinkers had 3.4 ml of hippocampus in their brains, while other spirit drinkers had 2.9 ml. Beer drinkers also had low levels of a compound called homocysteine, which plays a role in the development of heart disease, stroke and dementia.