Champagne, unlike other wines, undergoes a second fermentation in the bottle to trap carbon dioxide gas, which dissolves into the wine and forms the fabled bubbles in the bubbly. More than 600 different chemical compounds join carbon dioxide in champagne, each lending its own unique quality to the aroma and flavor of champagne. 

But even with all of that flavor, champagne would be just another white wine without those tiny bubbles. As the bubbles ascend the length of a glass in tiny trains, they drag along molecules of those 600 flavor and aroma substances. They literally explode out of the surface as the bubbles burst, tickling the nose and stimulating the senses.

The last 65 million years of natural history in North America may be broken into six distinct, consecutive waves of mammal species diversity, or evolutionary faunas', according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Swiss Army Jewelry?

The recent discovery of a pendant at the Irikaitz archaeological site in Zestoa in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa may be as old as 25,000 years, which would make it the oldest on the Iberian Peninsula.  This stone is nine centimeters long and has a hole for hanging it from the neck although it would seem it was used to sharpen tools. 

The late Devonian, about 390 million years ago to roughly 360 million years ago, was a time of struggle and escape for fish in a drying environment, theorized paleontologist Alfred Romer.  That circumstances and necessity for continued survival were vital in fish-tetrapod transition.

The number of people with one or more of the adverse complications of obesity, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease is rapidly increasing.

Drugs designed to treat obesity have shown limited efficacy and have been associated with serious side effects, largely because we have limited understanding of the effects of obesity on our natural mechanisms of body weight control.

For example, while great strides have been made in our understanding of how the brain controls our desire to feed, as well as the processes underlying the balancing of energy intake and expenditure, little is known about how the are altered by obesity. Two independent groups of researchers have now generated data that begin to address this issue.

The main observation here is that rationalization on the social level is rationalization on the personal level performed by macro-systems (social systems from our point of view). Scientism is the ultimate religion. Calling this a dangerous anti-science position is natural and expected at this point in evolution.

“Malicious,” “diatribe,” and “preposterous” are words recently thrown at me. (How remarkable that I lived nearly 60 years before drawing this kind of vitriol. Maybe I haven’t been assertive enough!) When a scientific question has political implications, people have trouble separating the science from the politics. Anyway, it started like this…

Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University wrote an astonishingly obtuse article in Slate (December, 2010) titled “Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That's a problem.” Sarewitz cited a 2009 Pew Research Center finding that 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans and 55 percent are Democrats. He took off from there.

Just as you thought it was over for 2011, and you proceeded to hung the Higgs mass plots on the christmas tree as a wish for stronger signals next year, ATLAS comes out with a new particle discovery. That's what I like of particle physics - there's always so much going on that the excitement is never really over.

Ohm For Christmas

The ohm is the unit of electrical resistance.  It is named in honor of the genius of Georg Ohm, who figured out that the flow of electricity in materials from a 'hot' source might just resemble the flow of heat from a hot source.  Ever since we started measuring electrical resistance in ohms, electricians and engineers have been making up atrocious puns based on that term.  I decided not to make an exception here.

Science for the win!