Poor Mojo's Newswire

The crack researchers at Wellesley College's Counterpoint magazine have taken some time from their $40,000-a-year educations to answer one of life's great questions: What college majors get it on the most?

Among the majors most likely to be virgins are math, chemistry and political science, the purviews of the nerdiest, most socially awkward among us. Those least likely to have retained their purity? Studio-art majors and anthropologists, the type of majors that lend themselves to those more interested in sexy time than study time.

Skunk has created a new domestic drugs industry, making millions for illegal farmers - mainly Vietnamese immigrants - on Britain's industrial estates, and it has done so in an astonishingly short time. Police seizures show that it accounted for barely 10 per cent of the cannabis sold here in the late 1990s; last year it was 80 per cent. What struck me, talking to teenagers in the course of writing this piece, was the sheer rapidity of this transformation. I'm in my thirties, yet what young people now regard as “normal” cannabis was unheard of in this country a decade ago. “Skunk is horribly strong - you can practically feel your brain cells knocking off,” says Ben, a 19-year-old student. “But it wasn't that we asked for it. Growing up in rural Herefordshire, it was all we could get.” ... The breakthrough for pot-smokers came when enterprising hippies returned from their travels with seeds from the variety of cannabis native to Afghanistan and India, Cannabis indica. Previously, few people had cared for the taste of Cannabis indica, but it was hardy and small. When Cannabis sativa was crossed with Cannabis indica, the industrial-scale home-grown market was born. And so, too, was skunk. ... Finally, the scientists also found that British skunk had, compared with resin, very low levels of a chemical called cannabidiol. This has sedative properties, and experts such as Professor Robin Murray, a consultant psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry and leading researcher into the effects of cannabis on mental health, have suggested that it could even work as an antipsychotic. “We know that there is an increased risk of psychosis in people who use the old-fashioned type of cannabis,” he says, “but no study has yet taken into account the change in cannabis composition. Our clinical impression is that our patients choose to use the stronger varieties, in the same way that a typical alcoholic is not drinking shandy but prefers vodka or whisky. The average psychotic cannabis user is more likely to use skunk.”

ATLANTA – More babies were born in the United States in 2007 than any year in the nation's history, topping the peak during the baby boom 50 years earlier, federal researchers reported Wednesday.

There is both good and bad news from the more than 4.3 million births:

_The U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a healthy trend.

_However, the teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row.

The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend begun years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.