Giving up your vices and guilty pleasures can lead to a happier and healthier life that’s full of purpose. Even though you might not see the changes day-to-day.

Even though alcohol kills millions of people every year, humans have been imbibing for millennia. In the last few decades, wine, in particular, has gained a reputation for being good for our health. Red wine even has been linked with longevity and lower risk of heart disease.

Mead is one of mankind's oldest forms of booze, but it's fallen out of fashion. A group of modern mead-makers is hoping to change that.

Long relegated to the dusty corners of history, mead - the drink of kings and Vikings - is making a comeback in the US. But what's brewing in this new crop of commercial meaderies - as they are known - is lot more refined from the drink that once decorated tables across medieval Europe.

True love has been standing right in front of you all along. Well, sitting. In a bottle.

Charles Percy Pickering (1825-1908) was a photographer in Sydney, Australia from 1855 to 1871. Sometime between 1863 and 1868, he photographed this series of images, probably for a local temperance organization. They show a man gradually climbing too deeply into a bottle.

In a charming turquoise hotel in south Malaysia, I spotted a familiar-shaped bottle with an unfamiliar label. The Majestic in Malacca was built as a Chinese tycoon’s mansion in the 1920s; the place probably didn’t have a cosy boozing nook with mahogany bar just inside the front door in his time, but that’s progress.

The researchers surveyed over 40,000 people with standard alcohol survey questions about their quantity and frequency of alcohol consumption — “How many drinks have you had in the past month?” and so on. But in a smart twist, they then asked a more immediate question: “How many drinks did you have yesterday?” This method is useful for detecting under-reporting because of the improbabilities it reveals.

It's no secret that combat experiences are highly stressful and can contribute to instances of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression among soldiers post-deployment. It also comes as no surprise that many soldiers afflicted with these conditions abuse alcohol in an attempt to self-medicate.

If you have one too many tonight, among the things you might be wondering tomorrow morning—along with “Where is the Advil?” and “Can everyone please just shhh?”—are a number of existential queries that hangovers, in all their guilt-inducing agony, tend to stir. Like, “Is that ‘hair of the dog’ thing true?” or “Why is it that hangovers always make me swear off drinking forever, yet I don’t?”

No one ever really knows when they have had "one too many" but you may now at least have a chance to keep better track. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has created what they are calling the "cocktail content calculator" in an effort to let drinkers know just how much alcohol is in that drink they are about to gulp down.

With a certain logic, quasi-taxi-like services such as Uber and Lyft provide a public health benefit to cities. They give the bar-hopping demographic a better way to get home at night, and, as a result, they may help cut down on DUIs.

Vodka can be used for a whole lot more than just drinking.

Gerry Tosh of Highland Park walks you through a simple formula for whisky nosing and tasting. This is designed for the novice and will hopefully help people experience whisky more fully.

The US public health establishment buries overwhelming evidence that abstinence is a cause of heart disease and early death. People deserve to know that alcohol gives most of us a higher life expectancy—even if consumed above recommended limits.

Devices that plug into smartphones to augment the built-in sensors with additional smarts are continuing to make their way to market, many fueled by crowdfunding. Here’s another contender aiming to extend the capability of Android smartphones: a teeny breathalyzer called DrinkMate, currently seeking $40,000 on Kickstarter to make it to market by December.

Police confirm ‘verbal and physical altercation’ took place outside house party in Anchorage, where former governor Sarah Palin was reported to have shouted: ‘Do you know who I am?’

Drug and alcohol use among America's teens continues to trend downward, according to new numbers released today by the Department of Health and Human Services. From 2002 to 2013, the average American teenager's odds of regular (at least monthly) tobacco use nearly halved. Recreational use of prescription painkillers saw a similar decline.

Baghdad’s beer-drinkers have it tough. Already shot at and persecuted, they have found prices soaring since Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham militants seized large swaths of northern Iraq in June and barred alcohol.

First we sweat, and then we swig: A new Northwestern Medicine study published in the journal Health Psychology finds that people tend to drink more alcohol on days they’ve exercised.