What makes the perfect beer foam? Is it nucleation in the glass? Beer is well-traveled ground on Science 2.0 and that means beer foam has been covered as well.

The biggest advice. Be careful with the detergent you use to wash your glass. An already lipid-optimized brew will not benefit from extra fat left over by detergent.

Cornell food researchers focus on lipids too, barley lipid transfer protein No. 1, aka LTP1.

Bitter compounds found in hops, like iso-alpha acids, are important to brewers, says Cornell's Karl J. Siebert, principal investigator and author of "Recent Discoveries in Beer Foam" in the Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists.

The venom from marine cone snails, used to immobilize prey, contains numerous peptides called conotoxins, some of which can act as painkillers in mammals.

A recent study provides new insight into the mechanisms by which one conotoxin, Vc1.1, inhibits pain. The findings help explain the analgesic powers of this naturally occurring toxin and could eventually lead to the development of synthetic forms of Vc1.1 to treat certain types of neuropathic pain in humans.

Can using a well move a mountain? It will if the well is big enough.

Winter rains and summer groundwater pumping in California's Central Valley make the Sierra Nevada and Coast Mountain Ranges sink and rise.

How much? A few millimeters each year. That doesn't sound like a lot but it creaes stress on the state's faults that could increase the risk of an earthquake.

Gradual depletion of the Central Valley aquifer due to groundwater pumping also raises these mountain ranges by a similar amount - about the thickness of a dime - each year, according to a new paper in Nature. That cumulative rise over the past 150 years could be up to 6 inches, according to calculations by the geophysicists. 

U.S. law requires posting summarized results on ClinicalTrials.gov, a service of the National Institutes of Health, within one year of study completion for certain categories of industry-sponsored trials. 

The European Union is considering following the US lead yet in some fields compliance with the U.S. law is still rather poor. 

Does it matter? There is increasing public pressure to report the results of all clinical trials. The belief if this would eliminate publication bias and improve public access but that is not evidence-based. What is the point of reading about failed industry trials? The products can't be approved, they will never be released and the start-up company behind the work will be sold off for parts soon after. 

Current computing is based on binary logic -- zeroes and ones -- also called Boolean computing, but a new type of computing architecture stores information in the frequencies and phases of periodic signals and could work more like the human brain using a fraction of the energy necessary for today's computers, according to a team of engineers.

Vanadium dioxide is called a "wacky oxide" because it transitions from a conducting metal to an insulating semiconductor and vice versa with the addition of a small amount of heat or electrical current. A device created by electrical engineers at Penn State uses a thin film of vanadium oxide on a titanium dioxide substrate to create an oscillating switch.

In 2009, a report on the state of forensic science by the National Academy of Sciences noted the lack of sound science in the analysis of evidence in criminal cases across the country.

You wouldn't know it from television shows, but even the most common and long-standing forensic techniques such as fingerprinting are considered questionable - and defense attorneys have a field day promoting fear and doubt about science in the best of circumstances. 

Natural gas has been true boon to emissions. When the rest of the civilized world was adopting more nuclear energy, American politicians representing their constituents were determined to kill it. President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry were cheered by their voters when they announced an end to nuclear science in America in the early 1990s. As a result, America built more coal and that led to America leading the world in CO2 emissions.

Your local multiplex has been packed with superheroes lately: Robocop, Captain America and Spider-Man have wowed us this year and Superman, Batman and the Avengers are waiting in the wings.

But have you ever noticed how unlikely each hero is? A maimed policeman, a teenager bitten by a radioactive spider, an orphan who starts dressing like a bat—on the face of it, they don't sound very helpful. But each winds up saving a boatload of folks who need to be protected from the forces of evil.

The 1918 Flu Pandemic infected over 500 million people and killed up to 50 million. 

Scholars have analyzed the pandemic in two remote regions of North America, finding that despite their geographical divide, both regions had environmental, nutritional and economic factors that influenced morbidity during the pandemic.

By analyzing death records and community history, they found that both Labrador and Alaska were devastated by the 1918 pandemic. Beginning in January 1918 and lasting through December 1920, both regions experienced higher mortality rates than most other parts of the world—34 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

If you think young adults regard Twitter and other social media as legitimate news sources, think again - they may be letting you think that, but even then they may be doing it ironically.

Instead, like most people on Twitter, they retweet messages they like and don't actually read any of the links, just like most people. And young people know that anyone can start a Twitter account and post bogus information. They know politicians do it, they know companies do it, they know anarchists do it.

Fan of science and critic of wasted science funding Senator Tom Coburn won't like this, but the National Science Foundation spent money to examine social media and "false memory" - as you