Every weekend, it’s easy to see the prevalence of the hookup culture at Georgetown. The number of hookups—and subsequent hookup horror stories—even led to three Georgetown students creation of WorstHookups.com, where students can share all the details of the encounters they’d rather forget.

Despite what appears to be a culture that encourages students to hookup when drunk, a new national study claims that the majority of undergraduates try to avoid this ritual.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s recently published, 141-person survey presented undergraduate respondents with a hypothetical scenario about their friend “Jane.” In the situation, Jane is drinking at a bar with her friends, then begins to drink with a guy at the bar who eventually invites her back to his place.

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Great news for aquatic mammal aficionados! Georgetown scientists have pioneered a non-invasive way to collect dolphin DNA through the animals’ blow.

What is blow, you ask? Just the dolphins’ exhalations. (Get your mind out of the gutter, creep.)

After training six bottlenose dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore to exhale on command, Professor Janet Mann, Ewa Krzyszczyk (G ’13), and Eric Patterson (G ’13) collected DNA samples by holding test tubes over the animals’ blowholes. The group later published an article titled “Thar She Blows!” in the scientific journal PLoS ONE, which argues that the blow sampling method works just as well as traditional blood sampling.

Mann now plans to bring the method Australia’s Shark Bay, where she hopes to study a wild population of bottlenose dolphins.

As for us, we’ll be over here chuckling to ourselves about the terminology.

Heh. “Blow.”

Photo: Blue & Gray

Last week, Preisdent John DeGioia was joined by Dean Chester Gillis, National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) Director Patrick Gallagher, and Board of Advisors Chair Alice O’Connor Funk to officially break ground on Georgetown’s new Science Center.

Construction of the Science Center, which is expected to be finished in 2012, was supported by a $6.9 million award granted by the NIST and funded by a federal stimulus program under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

In return for accepting the NIST award, the Science Center will become the headquarters of the Institute for Soft Matter and Synthesis.

“As we take Georgetown into its third century, we are laying the foundation for the future with this new building,” DeGioia said during Tuesday’s ceremony. “It will be a place where faculty and students will make new scientific discoveries, engage in world-class research and learn.”

The ground breaking ceremony has been a long time coming—the Office of Zoning approved Georgetown’s construction plans way back in 2007 before the recession hit. But now the money is flowing, the ground is broken, and all will soon be right in the worlds of Georgetown’s science majors.