Some day Lamar Odom is going to have to be honest about his marriage, and thanks to some scientists in the United Kingdom, he just lost his biggest excuse. Smart bros at Durham University – go Bulls! – have released a very important study that may forever stick a dagger in the heart of the Beer Goggles theory.

According to some big words and fancy science talk, chasing 3’s and 4’s at last call can no longer be blamed on blurred vision and tricks of the mind, and instead can all be written off as just plain, old bein’ horny.

Study author psychologist Dr. Amanda Ellison said that alcohol doesn’t make people look more attractive, it just increases their level of lust.

“There is no imagined physical transformation, just more desire,” Allison said, according to MSNnow.com. “Alcohol switches off the rational and decision-making areas of the brain while leaving the areas to do with sexual desire relatively intact.” (Via the HuffPo)

Look, I know I’m gonna catch some crap for this at the next BRO meeting, but I have to interject in this stupid, stupid, STUPID waste of time and money. I mean, there are doctors out there who are doing important things, like curing toddlers of AIDS and making beer with higher alcohol percentages. But these limey quacks? They’re just telling us what we already know and slapping “SCIENCE” on it in big red letters.

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This week, the Wednesday Dunk Battle goes high concept — what, scientifically speaking, constitutes the “best slam dunk?” Does it lessen the dunk’s greatness if it’s performed in practice? What if it involves a pillar of fire and a trampoline? What if you aren’t a human being and can dunk? How do they relate to one another?

Your job, as a loyal With Leather reader, is to view the following dunks and help decide which slam dunk slammed most dunkingly. It’s important that you participate and vote in the poll at the bottom, for without you, we may never know the perfect dunk equation.

This week’s dunks:

1. The Los Angeles Clippers block/pass/dunk machine leads to a massive left-handed effort from Blake Griffin.
2. LeBron James continues to nerf the entire 2013 Slam Dunk Contest by going between his legs in practice.
3. Kenneth Faried goes up Dwight Howard’s helpless back to catch an alley-oop.
4. A ridiculous man’s fire dunk, as seen yesterday on With Leather
5. Eddie the sea otter throws it down, as seen in Danger’s post from last Wednesday

Please view, and vote in the poll.

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While I’ve yet to try Ron Swanson’s guaranteed hangover cure, I have tried hundreds, if not thousands, of others and not a single one works. Hell, there was even a time when I would have paid a million doll hairs for a case of XXX Vitamin Water because I was convinced that it was the ultimate hangover cure, but it turns out that 50 Cent and the makers of that sugar water bullsh*t were simply full of crap. If I can’t trust a mediocre rapper for my vitamins, who can I trust?

But it appears that some UCLA professor/doctor/scientist types have their eyes on the lucrative, untapped market of leaving frat boys’ bathroom sinks unclogged, as UCLA’s Yunfeng Lu and Cheng Ji are hard at work on an actual, honest-to-Pappy Van Winkle cure for the common hangover. Sorry cancer, maybe next year.

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The headline reads “Report: Smoking may be beneficial to long distance runners”. Some of the reasons presented?

-Serum hemoglobin is related to endurance running performance. Smoking is known to enhance serum hemoglobin levels and (added bonus), alcohol may further enhance this beneficial adaptation.
-Lung volume also correlates with running performance, and training increases lung volume. Guess what else increases lung volume? Smoking.
-Running is a weight-bearing sport, and therefore lighter distance runners are typically faster runners. Smoking is associated with reduced body weight, especially in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (these folks require so much energy just to breath that they often lose weight).

In the discussion, [author Ken Myers] goes on to point out that:

Cigarette smoking has been shown to increase serum hemoglobin, increase total lung capacity and stimulate weight loss, factors that all contribute to enhanced performance in endurance sports. Despite this scientific evidence, the prevalence of smoking in elite athletes is actually many times lower than in the general population. The reasons for this are unclear; however, there has been little to no effort made on the part of national governing bodies to encourage smoking among athletes.

Disclaimer: This study was posted in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, so it could be completely wrong. You know how they are in Canada. Don’t start smoking and send me an angry e-mail when you’re on your knees in the middle of the hurdles throwing up your guts.

Of course, when you dig a little deeper you find out that this was written less to advocate smoking for runners and more to prove that you can prove anything with a review article. I’ve been arguing this for years. Eventually you learn that everything in recorded history is wrong and the science we’ve been raised to believe as fact has been erased and rewritten every hundred years. And people are always like, “oh, no, this is true, I proved it with a bunsen burner” and I’m like “RAHHH PEOPLE USED TO PROVE THE EARTH WAS FLAT WITH A BUNSEN BURNER SHUT UP”.

Regardless, it’s a compelling argument. Next, he should prove how eating more will boost your metabolism and help you be skinny. Yeah f**king right.

By now you’ve probably seen video of 24-year-old New Zealander Jed Mildon pulling off the world’s first (and by process of elimination, best) BMX triple backflip. What you haven’t seen is the amount of landscaping, foam pits and backbreaking scientific research that went into it. This video, courtesy of the Discovery Channel, explains exactly how it worked, rather than just showing you how awesomely it did.

I think this version is actually more impressive than initial video of the jump. I mean, the monkeys and typewriters vibe of life could allow somebody to jump off a skyscraper and live, and while that might be a fun video to stumble upon on Buzzfeed, it’s even more impressive when the monkey shows his work. Then you know you’ve got a truly-evolved sentient typewriter monkey, and building things like a giant bike ramp for triple backflips doesn’t seem some pointless. That example got weird. But hopefully you know what I’m saying. I’m happy knowing he could pull a triple backflip again, because he didn’t just pull it off, he made “pulling it off” a logical possibility.

I’m never going to get a job writing for the new Uproxx science blog with explanations like these. (That should be a real thing. And we should call it ‘With Levers’.)