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Vodka is our enemy, the Russian proverb goes, so we'll utterly consume it. This embrace of the enemy has a lot to do with the country's abysmal life expectancy rates, with one quarter of Russian men dying before age 55. But when the drinkers start cutting back, death rates drop almost immediately, a study finds.

"High mortality absolutely is caused by hazardous alcohol consumption," says Dr. David Zaridze of the Russian Cancer Research Center of Moscow, who with his colleagues tracked Russian drinking habits for a decade.

Indeed, the most striking thing about this study, which was published Thursday in The Lancet, is how closely changes in the country's mortality rates followed changes in Russian government policies on alcohol.

When the Soviet Union put prohibition in place in the mid-1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev, alcohol use dropped 25 percent. Death rates among men under 55 dropped. Drinking started creeping back up, and so did deaths. Both spiked after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. "The first event of the free market was cheap vodka and cheap cigarettes," Zaridze told Shots. "Of course the Russians who hadn't seen cheap vodka started to drink again."

Mortality rates rose again during the hard times after the collapse of the ruble in 1998, but have been declining for almost a decade, a change Zaridze says is due to tighter regulation of vodka sales starting in 2006 under Vladimir Putin.

That includes restricting retail sales to licensed liquor stores and banning night sales. "Since 2006 the per-capita sales of strong alcohol have declined by 33 percent," Zaridze told Shots. "This has been followed by decrease in mortality. This is our aim, our final aim."

Women's death rates also reflected alcohol policy, but less strongly. In Russia, vodka remains a man's drink, consumed neat. And though consumption of beer and wine has risen in recent years, vodka remains the alcohol delivery system of choice.

This is the first study to track the drinking habits of a large group of Russians, following 151,000 people for more than a decade. The men who drank the most, three or more half-liter bottles of vodka a week, were much more likely to die before age 55 than those who said they drank less than one bottle a week.

A lot of that vodka was downed in binges, which may also contribute to the high death rate. Some deaths were from alcohol poisoning or cancer. Others were due to violence, accidents or suicide.

But the fact that Russians are drinking less doesn't mean social attitudes about alcohol have changed, Zaridze says. "I don't think so, unfortunately."

In Russia, he says, "drinking is a socially accepted way of life. Everyone drinks; educated people, not educated people, all social classes. It is accepted and appreciated." But people need to realize, he says, that "alcohol kills [the] nation."

That's not an impossible shift, Zaridze says, pointing to other European countries with a long history of extreme consumption of spirits. "Even our Nordic neighbors, the Finns, the Swedes, they had a real problem with drinking. But they have changed."

You know, when it comes to studies about how women think, I must admit that I always plunge in with great and girlish (!) excitement, because as much as the stereotyping may officially bother me, let's face it: there is part of me that thinks, "Oh, this is going to be good."

That's how I felt about the headline, "Study: Women most attracted to guys in trucks." Ooooh, tell me more, Yahoo Car And Truck Section! I am on pins and needles. (And in heels, metaphorically speaking.)

Well, it turns out that Insure.com, which specializes in providing insurance quotes and is brimming with expertise about psychology and gender roles, asked 2,000 men and women what kinds of cars attractive people drive. Gamely going along with the idea that hot people drive certain kinds of cars (to me, it's a little bit like being asked how tall people take their coffee, but whatever), the respondents offered up some wisdom. Or should we say, "wisdom."

It turns out that women think desirable guys drive — in this order — pickup trucks, sports cars, SUVs, sedans, hybrid/electric cars, UPS trucks, minivans, and mail trucks. Now it goes without saying that the most hilarious part of this data is that minivans are between UPS trucks and mail trucks. Whoever missed the opportunity to make the headline, "Women say dudes in minivans hotter than dudes in mail trucks, uglier than dudes in UPS trucks," you are fired. FIRED.

This is a study, for real, that imagines that a group of women are sitting around, Sex And The City-style (the only way women do anything according to studies like this), and one of them says to the other one, "My new boyfriend drives a minivan." And everybody makes a little face. You know, they're all judging. Like we do. And then another one says, "My new boyfriend drives a UPS truck." And everybody else goes, "Well, GAME SET MATCH, I cannot compete with that."

Men provided this list in order, from hottest to least hot: sports cars, sedans, SUVs, pickup trucks, hybrid/electric, minivans. Ladies who deliver things, you are not even included. Packages, mail, whatever — unless it's kids to soccer practice, your delivery routine makes you un-hot. Off the hotness scale!

Let's turn it over now to Joe Wiesenfelder, executive editor of Cars.com, who is here to explain why these survey results seem "very accurate." Joe says that — and I am quoting Joe directly here, lest you think I have made Joe up and he is a puppet I am operating made out of popsicle sticks and old copies of Cosmopolitan — "A woman walks up to a black pickup truck and says to herself, 'Here's a guy who can help me move, bring me large gifts from Crate & Barrel and do repairs around my condo.'"

Joe! Joe! You have cracked the code! It's true. Women do not actually mean "hot" when they say "hot." They don't mean lusty hot, or symmetrical-face hot, or big-shoulders hot. They mean "transported a bar cabinet to my door on his back" hot. They mean "carried a couch" hot. They mean "oiled my hinges" hot. (Hey. HINGES AT THE IMAGINARY CONDO. Don't be gross. This is for science.)

Joe goes on to clarify that women also like a clean black pickup truck, because it means that the guy washes his own car, and therefore will also wash the woman's car. That's right. We may have jobs, we may have our own incomes and retirement funds and condos in our own names in need of repair, but driving through a car wash is too much to ask. Maybe we're confused: Are we supposed to drive forwards or backwards? What's all this water? WHAT ARE THESE SHEEPDOG THINGS WHIRRING AGAINST MY WINDOWS? I need a guy with a clean black pickup truck to wash my car for me. Hey, there's one now! My car is dirty! Come date me, Captain Pickup!

(I'm not going to lie: if I met a guy who called himself "Captain Pickup," I might have dinner with him, just out of respect.)

Joe has an idea, too, about why men express a preference for women in BMWs, and he explains it in terms of his own feelings as a single dude: a high-performance BMW means she's rich ("I don't want to carry the entire relationship") and she's not a nag about his super-fast driving.

Thanks, Joe! Vroom vroom!

From here, we move on to Edmunds.com editor Mike Magrath and senior analyst Jessica Caldwell. Mike has a slightly simpler idea about the appeal of a truck that is not dependent on the idea that women spend most of their time asking men to move furniture: it's "rugged," Mike says. What, nothing about how if it's clean, the guy will wash my car for me? Hmph.

Jessica, meanwhile, points out that there are women who like a "more cosmopolitan" type of fellow in a Range Rover or Tesla. But she doesn't want to see a guy in what she calls "chick cars." She actually says that she would think twice about dating a guy who drove a VW Beetle because telling your friends about him would be "humiliating."

(I kind of get a feeling that Joe and Jessica should get coffee, because they have been watching, or living vicariously through, the same movies about the same kinds of women.)

There are some other findings as well, such as Men Hate Dents and Ladies Are Bothered By Loud Exhaust. And in the end, Joe says, "Your car always reflects something about you. You don't always know what, but it must reflect something."

Truer words were never said, Joe. Truer words were never said.

Hey, is that your mail truck? Roooowwwwr.

The sedation that put race car legend Michael Schumacher into a medically induced coma after he suffered a serious head injury while skiing in France last month is gradually being reduced "to allow the start of the waking up process," the German driver's manager said Thursday.

ESPN's F1 website reminds us that the 45-year-old Schumacher "suffered a severe head injury on Dec. 29 when he fell and hit a rock while skiing in the French Alps. Surgeons performed two operations to remove blood clots around his brain since when he has been kept in a coma." The coma was induced to help reduce and control swelling in the brain. Schumacher was wearing a helmet when he crashed.

The process of reducing sedation and bringing Schumacher out of the coma "may take a long time," manager Sabine Kehm says.

It's too soon to say too much about Schumacher's post-coma prospects, though experts are expressing concern.

The French newspaper L'Equipe reported this week that doctors say there have been "encouraging signs" from recent neurological tests.

But the BBC has spoken with "two experts — Professor Gary Hartstein, Formula 1's chief medic between 2005 and 2012, and Mr. Colin Shieff, neurosurgeon at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London":

"Both Hartstein and Shieff believe it will be difficult for Schumacher to return to the same level of health he had before his accident.

" 'It is extremely unlikely, and I'd honestly say virtually impossible, that the Michael we knew prior to this fall will ever be back,' Hartstein said. ...

"Shieff agreed that outcome was 'extremely unlikely.'

" 'It is generally accepted that the longer a patient is in a reduced state of consciousness, the less likely they are to make a good recovery,' he said. 'It is still possible to regain consciousness, but this is far from certain.' "

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board has released its draft report into the causes of a devastating 2010 explosion at a Tesoro refinery on Puget Sound. The accident killed seven workers, and the community has been increasingly upset by how long the investigation has dragged on.

Now the draft report is out, and it's accompanied by a fascinating computer animation that's quite instructive — especially to the uninitiated.

Watching the video below, you get a much better appreciation for how a witch's brew of chemicals can eat away at steel tanks, and the very real dangers faced every day by the people who refine the petroleum products that we take for granted.

The CSB is an independent investigative agency, and its recommendations aren't necessarily binding. But, given the death toll, there may be more pressure on the refinery industry to emulate the European system of aggressively identifying potential hazards, such as hydrogen-weakened steel, in order to minimize them.