Droplets of condensation may make a cold can of beer look more appealing on a hot day, but they're also making that frosty brew warm up faster. So here's some news you can use: If it's hot and humid, put a cover over your can of cold beverage. And if you want to warm up a frozen can quickly, don't bake it. Steam it.

That's exactly what University of Washington researchers did in a series of experiments to show how the warming power of condensation applies to issues ranging from colder beer to hotter climates.

The beer-can study, published in the April issue of Physics Today, began a couple of years ago when UW atmospheric scientist Dale Durran was looking for a way to explain how condensation produced heat as the flip side of evaporative cooling. The cooling effect is well-known — we feel it when sweat evaporates to cool us off in the summer time, or when we turn on a mist cooler. But the flip side of the effect is less widely understood.

Durran figured out that the condensation on a cold aluminum can might serve as a handy illustration. He did a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation, and found that the heat released by water just 100 microns (four thousandths of an inch) thick should heat its contents by 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).

"I was surprised to think that such a tiny film of water would cause that much warming," Durran said in a UW news release.

He recruited a fellow atmospheric scientist at UW, Dargan Frierson, to conduct the initial experiment ... in Frierson's basement bathroom. First, they set a can of beverage on the toilet tank and warmed it up with a space heater. Then they took another can, turned on the shower and let the bathroom get nice and steamy. Each time they ran the experiment, the researchers stuck a thermometer through the can's pop-top opening and watched the temperature rise over the course of 15 minutes.

Mariusz Kaldon

Droplets of condensation on a chilly can are a signal that the temperature inside is rising.

Frierson said conditions got a little sticky in the steamed-up bathroom. "I think that's the most uncomfortable my research has ever made me — but it's all for science," he told NBC News.

Even though the air temperature was the same in both cases, the liquid in the steamed-up can warmed up twice as fast. The researchers followed up on the basement-bathroom findings with more rigorous lab experiments. Every time, the cans warmed up more quickly in more humid conditions.

The researchers even charted how quickly 12-ounce aluminum cans of chilled liquid should warm up, depending on different levels of temperature and humidity. For example, in five minutes, the can should get 6 degrees F (3 degrees C) warmer due to condensation amid New Orleans' typical summer conditions. The equivalent warm-up factor would be 3.5 degrees F (2 degrees C) in New York, and 2 degrees F (1 degree C) in Seattle. But in Dhahran, a Saudi city that ranks among the hottest, stickiest places in the world, the can would get about 14 degrees F (8 degrees C) warmer in five minutes.

That's why covering a cold can is a such a good idea on a steamy-hot summer day. "Probably the most important thing a beer koozie does is not simply insulate the can, but keep condensation from forming on the outside of it," Durran said.

The effects of condensation and evaporation are well-known to climatologists, but Durran and Frierson say the beer-can experiments can give the general public a better understanding of atmospheric dynamics.

"Condensation as a heat source is just tremendously important," Frierson said. "It's really like the gasoline that powers hurricanes, thunderstorms and tornadoes."

Some climate models suggest that there could be 25 percent more humidity in the atmosphere by the end of the 21st century, and that could lead to more bouts of extreme weather in the decades to come.

"We want people to appreciate how powerful this effect is," Durran told NBC News. "A very thin film around the can makes a big difference in the temperature of its contents, and that just makes you appreciate the importance of that same heating effect in our atmosphere."

Here's how to run the experiment described in the YouTube video from University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences Outreach:

1. Freeze two cans of your favorite beverage. This should take roughly seven hours, depending on your freezer.
2. Fifteen minutes before taking out the cans, preheat oven to 250 degrees F and start boiling water in a pot. Place a cookie rack on top of pot.
3. Take the cans out of freezer. Place one in the preheated oven. and one over the boiling pot. 
4. Start timer for 10 minutes. 
5. After 10 minutes, carefully remove cans from oven and pot.
6. Crack open both cans and pour into separate glasses.
7. Take a photo/video of the two cans and glasses, go to the UW YouTube page, and post a video response.

More beer-can science:

• Tiny sip of beer can produce burst of pleasure
• Study explains the science of a beer buzz
• Scientists study how beer goes bad

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET April 26: Would wiping off the drops of condensation keep your drink cooler? Sorry, says UW spokeswoman Hannah Hickey. "That will only make your drink even warmer," she writes in a Twitter update.

Update for 2:25 p.m. ET April 27: Some commenters are wondering why there's so much fuss over a relatively simple concept. The point of the exercise wasn't really to break new ground in atmospheric physics (or in summertime beverage consumption), but "to improve our intuition about the power of condensational heating" — which is a huge factor in climate dynamics. Durran explained further in a comment below, and I'm providing an extended version of his comments here to give them a little more visibility:

"In my class, students definitely need to know how condensation causes heating. Here's how. There are bonds that link water molecules together into a crystal lattice to form ice. It takes heat (energy) to break a few of those bonds and turn ice to liquid water. To evaporate the liquid water, the rest of the bonds between molecules need to be broken, which takes a lot more heat. Once all the bonds are broken, the liquid is converted to water vapor, an invisible gas.

"This processes reverses when water vapor is cooled enough to condense as liquid water. Bonds between molecules re-form, and the heat it took to originally break them is released into the surroundings.

"The reason we make a big deal about the power of condensational heating is that it does amazing things in the atmosphere, such as powering the updrafts in thunderstorms. The rising cloud-filled updrafts in the video linked below ascend like hot-air balloons because they are warmed, not by burning a fuel like propane, but by the heat released as water vapor condenses.

"Here's the video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVIwDoogncQ

"Such a visualization might help people understand some of the applications. (Only the last half of the Physics Today article was about the beer can heating.)"

Durran and Frierson are the authors of "Condensation, Atmospheric Motion, and Cold Beer" in Physics Today. Supplemental experiments are described in "An Experiment Uses Cold Beverages to Demonstrate the Warming Power of Latent Heat." Lab experiments were performed by Stella Choi and Steven Brey. Galen Richards and Jaycyl Golding, high school students serving as Pacific Science Center Discovery Corps interns, worked on earlier versions of the experiments. Instrument makers Allen Hart and Steven Domonkos built experimental apparatuses. Funding was provided by National Science Foundation grants AGS-0846641 and AGS-1138977.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Reidar Hahn / Fermilab

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment, or CDMS, adds new intrigue to the subatomic hunt.

Three potential signatures of exotic dark matter particles have been found hidden in the readings from an underground lab in Minnesota  — and although the results are too tentative to be classified as a discovery, scientists say they provide promising new clues to the solution of a decades-old mystery.

"People shouldn't come away from this thinking that we've found dark matter," Rupak Mahapatra, a physicist at Texas A&M University who is a principal investigator with the SuperCDMS collaboration, told NBC News. "Really, it's just the beginning. ... What we really need to do is make more detectors and run them, and be sure."

If the results are confirmed, that would point to the existence of a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP, that could help account for the 27 percent of the universe that is thought to consist of dark matter. Such matter seems to be invisible and is detected primarily through its gravitational effect. Another mysterious quality known as dark energy accounts for 68 percent of the universe. That leaves just 5 percent consisting of ordinary matter — the stuff that makes up everything we see around us.

Physicists have puzzled over the nature of dark matter since the 1930s, and billions of dollars have been spent building experiments to track it down. 

Finding, or fluke?
The three high-energy events were recorded in 2008 by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS, an experiment that was set up a decade ago nearly a half-mile (713 meters) underground in northern Minnesota's Soudan mine. That depth helps to shield the experiment from background cosmic rays that would overwhelm the signature of dark matter interactions at the surface.

The interactions seen by the CDMS team point to the existence of WIMPs with a best-guess mass of 8.6 billion electron volts, which would be about nine times as massive as the proton. Scientists calculated that there should be, on average, 0.7 events of that type recorded during the time frame for the readings.

NASA / CXC / CfA / STScI / Magellan / Univ. of Ariz. / ESO

X-ray observations of the Bullet Cluster provide some of the best evidence for the existence of dark matter. Click on the image to learn more.

It's possible that the three events are statistical flukes — analogous to, say, rolling three 7's in a row at a Vegas craps table. In this case, the scientists say there's a 99.8 percent chance that their results reflect a real phenomenon rather than a random crap shoot. That's significant, but it's not significant enough to claim a discovery. To make such a claim, the confidence level would have to go up to 99.9999 percent, or 5-sigma in math-geek speak.

"In medicine, you can say you are curing 99.8 percent of the cases, and that's OK. When you say you've made a fundamental discovery in high-energy physics, you can't be wrong," Mahapatra explained in a Texas A&M news release. "Given the money involved — $30 million in this case — it has to be extremely precise. With a 99.8 percent chance, that means if you repeated the same experiment a few hundred times, there is one chance it can go wrong. We want one out of a million instead."

Mahapatra said it took almost five years to notice the potential dark matter events because the CDMS team began their analysis by looking at the results from a set of germanium detectors, which are sensitive to higher masses. Another set of data was collected using silicon detectors, which are sensitive to lower masses, but those readings were put aside.

In the past few years, other dark-matter experiments began pointing to a mass range that was lower than scientists expected. "When they started seeing something significant, we thought we would look at our silicon data, which we were sitting on for more than four years," Mahapatra said.

'Hot on the trail'
Caltech theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll agreed that it was too early to declare a discovery, but said "it would not be a surprise" if the CDMS data ended up being confirmed. Other experiments, ranging from AMS to LUX to SuperCDMS to Xenon1T, will be adding to the evidence. "It is certainly a reminder that we are hot on the trail of looking for dark matter," Carroll told NBC News.

He was intrigued by the possibility that the heavier particle mass could explain why dark matter accounts for so much more of the universe than ordinary matter. "You can imagine that there is one dark matter particle for every ordinary particle," Carroll said.

Some theorists propose that ordinary matter and dark matter come into existence through a process known as cosmic cladogenesis. Mahapatra said a balance in the number of the two types of particles would fit such a hypothesis. "It's either a coincidence, or a tremendous clue," Mahapatra said.

More about dark matter:

• Dark matter hints found on space station
• How to catch dark matter
• Why dark matter matters

The report from the CDMS Collaboration, "Dark Matter Search Results Using the Silicon Detectors of CDMS II," was discussed over the weekend at the American Physical Society's April meeting in Denver and has been submitted for publication in Physical Review Letters. Mahapatra is one of 89 listed co-authors.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA file

A fish-eye view of the International Space Station from July 2011 shows the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) in the foreground. A Russian Progress cargo ship and a Soyuz crew capsule are docked on the left end of the station. The structure extending to the left of the AMS is a thermal radiator. Off to the right, the shuttle Atlantis is docked to the station's Tranquility module.

Scientists say a $2 billion antimatter-hunting experiment on the International Space Station has detected its first hints of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up almost a quarter of the universe.

The evidence from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, revealed Wednesday at Europe's CERN particle physics lab, is based on an excess in the cosmic production of anti-electrons, also known as positrons. The AMS research team can't yet rule out other explanations for the excess, but the fresh findings provide the best clues yet as to the nature of dark matter.

"Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin," Samuel Ting, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who leads the international AMS collaboration, said in a CERN news release.

The results have been published in Physical Review Letters and were discussed during a NASA news conference.

Dark matter is so named because it hasn't been detected directly through electromagnetic emissions, but primarily through its gravitational effect. Precise measurements of the movements of galaxies and galaxy clusters, as well as studies of the big bang's afterglow, indicate that it accounts for 22.7 percent of the universe's content. Another mysterious factor known as dark energy makes up 72.8 percent, leaving just 4.5 percent for ordinary matter.

Scientists have theorized that ultra-high-energy collisions involving dark matter particles could produce more positrons than expected. The best places to detect such collisions are in huge underground experiments such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider — or in outer space, where cosmic rays can be measured more easily than they are on Earth. 

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is the most sensitive cosmic-ray detector ever put into orbit. Researchers from 16 countries worked for well more than a decade to get AMS ready for the space station, but it literally took an act of Congress to get the extra money needed for the launch. The bus-sized device was brought up on the shuttle Endeavour and installed in 2011, during the shuttle fleet's second-last mission. 

Since then, readings from the AMS have been flowing in to Ting and his colleagues for analysis. CERN said the results announced on Wednesday are based on 25 billion recorded events, including 400,000 positrons with energies between 500 million electron volts and 350 billion electron volts. "This represents the largest collection of antimatter particles recorded in space," CERN said.

Researchers noticed an increase in the fraction of positrons detected in the range of 10 billion to 250 billion electron volts. They said the data showed no significant variation over time, or any preferred incoming direction. All this is consistent with the annihilation of dark matter particles in space.

CERN

This chart compares the results from AMS on positron emissions with results from other experiments. AMS measurements at different energy levels are represented by the red dots with error bars.

Other experiments have recorded similar increases in positron production, but AMS was able to chart the rise in unprecedented detail. Ting compared the resolution to seeing something with the naked eye vs. an electron microscope. "It is these fine features that are the difference between us and the rest of the experiments," he told reporters.

Further evidence is needed, however: It's possible that the bump in positrons could be created by emissions from pulsars spread across the galactic plane. The most promising hypothesis suggests that dark matter is part of a yet-to-be-detected array of "supersymmetric" particles, and if that concept is correct, researchers should see a sharp drop in the positron emissions at energies higher than 250 billion electron volts.

Ting said there's not yet enough data to render a decision about such a drop-off. "We want to know how quickly it drops off, how sharp is the drop-off," he told NBC News. "It's the way it drops off that tells you whether it's dark matter collisions, or from pulsars." 

He pointed out that the newly released findings are based on just 10 percent of the data AMS is expected to collect.

"When you take a new precision instrument into a new regime, you tend to see many new results, and we hope this this will be the first of many," Ting said. "AMS is the first experiment to measure to 1 percent accuracy in space. It is this level of precision that will allow us to tell whether our current positron observation has a dark matter or pulsar origin."

Future revelations are expected to come from AMS as well as from the Large Hadron Collider and other underground laboratories.

"The AMS result is a great example of the complementarity of experiments on Earth and in space,” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in Wednesday's statement. “Working in tandem, I think we can be confident of a resolution to the dark matter enigma sometime in the next few years."

Update for 4:40 p.m. ET April 3: One of the experiments that could make a direct detection of dark matter particles in the months ahead is the Large Underground Xenon Experiment. LUX is located in an old gold mine, almost a mile deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The project's scientists will keep watch for telltale interactions between dark matter and the xenon in their detector. In an emailed statement, LUX co-spokesperson Richard Gaitskell, a physicist at Brown University, hailed the AMS results but said that questions remain:

"Obviously it’s a fantastic new instrument. It’s considerably more sensitive than anything we’ve previously flown as far as looking for antiparticles. So it’s a tremendous step forward.

"The results themselves are consistent with a flux of antiparticles that come from dark matter. On the downside, no aspect of the data that’s been discussed so far allows one to differentiate between an explanation that these antiparticles are coming from dark matter or from another astrophysical source.

"What we see is that at the higher-energy regime that the detector, there is a significant increase in the positron flux. That’s interesting, but it’s been recorded by previous instruments. What we were hoping to see was some additional structure. We’d like to see a bump that has some upper energy threshold or edge, rather just a rise at higher energies. Right now, the new data from AMS does not provide a definitive indication of an upper edge. We’d like to see something like that as direct evidence of dark matter."

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden issued a statement that focusing on the roles played by the space agency and the International Space Station. " I am confident that this is only the first of many scientific discoveries enabled by the station that will change our understanding of the universe," Bolden said. "Multiple NASA human spaceflight centers around the country played important roles in this work, and we look forward to many more exciting results from AMS."

More about dark matter:

• How to catch a dark matter particle
• Dark matter finding thrown into question
• Why dark matter matters

To watch the full NASA news conference, click to the 48-minute mark in this Ustream recording.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

ESA

This all-sky map from the Planck probe charts the imprint of the big bang's cosmic afterglow.

The Planck cosmology probe has forced scientists to revise their estimates of the universe's age and the cosmic balance of matter and dark energy — and now it's led a physicist to remix the sound of the big bang as well.

The new big-bang sound was created over the weekend by John Cramer, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Washington. The audio file follows up on Cramer's decade-old audio rendition of the big bang, which was based on data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP.

Planck and WMAP both charted subtle variations in the all-sky cosmic microwave background, a super-faint glow of stretched-out radiation from a time when the universe was 380,000 years old. The variations amount to mere millionths of a degree in temperature, but they record the imprint of fluctuations left behind by the big bang.

Cramer released his original WMAP big-bang sound 10 years ago, but the Planck readings were so much better that a remix was in order.

"The new frequency spectrum goes to much higher frequencies than did the WMAP analysis, and therefore offers a more 'high-fidelity' rendition of the Sound of the Big Bang," Cramer explained on a Web page providing the updated sound files. We're featuring the 20-second version, but you can download versions that play out for as long as 500 seconds.

"I recommend the 100-second version, but you can choose for yourself," Cramer said.

The sound follows the curves in Planck data to reflect the propagation of pressure waves through the medium of the early universe during the first 760,000 years of its evolution. The time scale has been speeded up astronomically, of course, and Cramer figures that the frequency has been scaled up by a factor of 100 septillion (that's a 1 followed by 26 zeroes).

"The actual Big Bang frequencies, which had wavelengths on the order of a fraction of the size of the universe, were far too low to be heard by humans (even had any been around)," Cramer explained.

Ten years ago, Cramer said that when he played the sound of the WMAP data on his computer, his dogs pricked up their ears and listened attentively. "There was less reaction from the dogs this time, but there was some barking when the big bang sound initially came on," Cramer told NBC News in an email.

Sharp-eared listeners with a good sound system will notice that the Planck remix doesn't rattle the speakers as much as the WMAP original does. "The big bang sound is different because of the higher frequency components from Planck, and because I decided to shift the frequency scale factor to make less bass (since not everyone has a sub-woofer on their PC)," Cramer said.

In addition to the big-bang sound, Cramer has several unorthodox claims to scientific fame, including his long-running column for Analog magazine; his science-fiction novels, "Twistor" and "Einstein's Bridge"; and his experiment to find out whether quantum mechanics would allow for backward causality.

Cramer said his retrocausality experiment is currently in limbo. He has always said that there might be some subtle quantum effect that would rule out backward causality, and so far that's been the case.

"The Mark II version of the retrocausality experiment has concluded for now, defeated by detector noise," he said in his email. "I'm currently in the process of writing a new pre-proposal (to a government organization I won't name) seeking funding for a Mark III version of the experiment.  It would use noise-free superconducting-transition single photon detectors instead of the too-noisy avalanche photodiodes, would be down-scaled in wavelength a bit so that the entangled photon pairs would be at wavelengths matching the communication industry standard wavelengths for fiber optics, and would use two switched single-mode fiber optic Mach-Zehnder interferometers instead of lenses, prisms and mirrors on an optics table.  Said organization is interested because there is the possibility of zero-time-delay communication with distant space missions."

Read that last sentence again: Someone in the government is interested in zero-time-delay communication with distant space missions. Albert Einstein's theories suggest that information can't be transmitted any faster than the speed of light, but Einstein himself said quantum mechanics might open the door for "spooky action at a distance." Zero-time-delay communication certainly sounds spooky — but is it possible? Stay tuned.

Scott Eklund / Seattle P-I file

University of Washington physicist John Cramer, seen here in a 2007 photo, has been working on a laser experiment to test whether causality can work backward in time.

More weird physics:

• Math twisted for faster-than-light travel
• Bizarre quantum physics may play role in life
• New view: Big bang was a big crystallization

Audio clips: Copyright 2013 John G. Cramer.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

ESA

The Planck mission has produced the most detailed all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The European-led team behind the Planck cosmology probe on Thursday released the mission's first all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background — a post-big-bang "baby picture" that suggests our universe is about 100 million years older than scientists thought.

The map traces subtle fluctuations in temperature that were imprinted on the deep sky when the cosmos was just 370,000 years old. Scientists say the imprint reflects ripples that arose as early as the first nonillionth of a second of the universe's existence. These ripples are thought to have given rise to today's vast cosmic web of galaxy clusters and dark matter.

"To a cosmologist, this map is a gold mine of information," University of Cambridge astrophysicist George Efstathiou, a member of the Planck science team, said during a European Space Agency news conference in Paris. He joked that not long ago, cosmologists might have "given up their children" to have such a map in their hands.

The $900 million (€700 million) Planck probe was launched on a European Ariane 5 rocket in 2009, along with the infrared-sensitive Herschel space telescope. Planck produced its first all-sky radiation map in 2010. Since then, scientists have fine-tuned the image to remove the bright emissions from the Milky Way and other foreground sources, leaving only the background radiation.

Two NASA satellites — the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, also known as COBE and WMAP — produced earlier versions of the baby picture. Those findings determined that the universe is made up of 4.5 percent ordinary matter, 22.7 percent dark matter, and 72.8 percent dark energy. The results also showed that the universe is geometrically "flat" to a margin of error of 0.4 percent, and helped scientists estimate the universe's age at 13.7 billion years.

NASA

Planck's map of the cosmic microwave background has significantly higher resolution than the readings that were made during previous missions such as COBE and WMAP, as shown in this graphic.

Planck can produce cosmological maps with three times the resolution of WMAP, and at least 10 times the temperature sensitivity. As a result, the estimates of the universe's age and composition have undergone some additional fine tuning. Planck's readings indicate that the universe's expansion rate is slower than previously thought — which means the universe is older.

Planck's estimate for the age of the universe is 13.82 billion years.

Martin White, a member of the Planck team from the University of California at Berkeley, told NBC News that Planck's estimate narrowed down the error bars on previous estimates. "In that sense, it's very consistent, but much more precise," he said.

The Planck team's breakdown of the universe's constituents is 4.9 percent ordinary matter, 26.8 percent dark matter and 68.3 percent dark energy, he said. "There's less stuff that we don't understand, by a tiny amount," Efstathiou said. As a result of the shift toward more matter and less dark energy, "an awful lot of people are going to be revising their calculations," White said.

Efstathiou said the Planck data also pointed to some "strange features" in the cosmic microwave background that may point to new frontiers in physics, including an unexplained dip at one point of the power spectrum, and an unusual distribution of large-scale fluctuations that roughly followed the plane of the solar system.

"Why characteristics of the CMB should relate to our solar system is not understood. ... I was explicitly told not to say anything about God in this talk — which I've just violated," Efstathiou said half-jokingly.

ESA

This graphic highlights anomalies seen in the Planck data. One anomaly is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky (indicated by the curved line), with slightly higher average temperatures in the southern ecliptic hemisphere and slightly lower average temperatures in the northern ecliptic hemisphere. This runs counter to the mainstream view that the universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look. There is also a cold spot that extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected (circled). The anomalous regions have been enhanced here to make them more clearly visible.

Planck's data set should help scientists do a reality check on many of the hypotheses proposed by cosmologists, including the view that the universe underwent rapid and far-reaching inflation in the first moments of its existence, as well as the claim that there are six or seven spatial dimensions in addition to the three we perceive.

An initial reading of the data appears to favor the simple models for the inflationary big bang, and rule out a lot of the complex models. "We think that they will be facing a dead end," said Krzysztof Gorski, a member of the Planck team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain noted that so far, the mission has delivered just half of the data it's expected to produce. The rest of the data is scheduled to come out in 2014 and 2015. "Today is not the end of the story," he told reporters. Efstathiou put it another way, paraphrasing one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's best-known catchphrases: "We'll be back."

More about cosmology:

• WMAP scientists unveil their best 'baby picture'
• Japanese string theorists simulate big bang
• Scrunched-up dimensions untangled

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:49 AM EDT

CMS Collaboration / CERN

This proton-proton collision, recorded with the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid last year, shows the characteristics expected from the decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson to a pair of Z bosons. One of the Z particles subsequently decays to a pair of electrons (green lines and green towers), and the other Z decays to a pair of muons (red lines). The event could also be due to known Standard Model background processes

The subatomic particle discovered last year at Europe's Large Hadron Collider is looking more and more like the fabled Higgs boson, the one fundamental piece that's been missing from the theory that governs particle physics. But at a widely anticipated conference in Italy, physicists said they can't yet confirm 100 percent that this is the particle they're looking for.

Ever since the "Higgs-like particle" was detected, researchers at the LHC have been trying to determine whether this is the one true Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model, or whether it's just one of several subatomic particles that play a role in imparting mass to other particles. There's even a chance that this particular particle something completely different, possibly linked to the way gravity works, said James Gillies, a spokesman for the CERN particle physics center on the French-Swiss border.

CERN is the international organization in charge of operating the world's biggest and costliest particle accelerator.

The key to confirming the particle's status is to determine a property known as spin, CERN says. If the new particle is spin-zero, then it's a Higgs boson. If it's spin-two, it's something else. The latest results, presented at the annual Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, can't yet rule out a spin-two particle, CERN said.

"Until we can confidently tie down the particle's spin, the particle will remain Higgs-like," CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said in a statement on Wednesday. "Only when we know that is has spin-zero will we be able to call it a Higgs."

Physicists will continue to analyze the data collected at the LHC over the past couple of years, and there's a good chance they'll come up with the confirmation in the months ahead — even though the collider was shut down last month for an upgrade that's expected to require two years of work. That's not guaranteed, however. Raymond Volkas, a physicist from Australia's University of Melbourne, told New Scientist that Higgs-watchers might have to prepare themselves for the possibility that the LHC will never fully confirm the mystery particle to be the Standard Model Higgs.

Last year, scientists were intrigued by an extra "peak" in the data from ATLAS, one of the LHC's main detectors. Some wondered whether that hinted at the existence of two Higgs bosons instead of just one. But now that more readings have been added to the analysis, the anomalous peak is fading.

"When we first saw this excess a year ago, we were excited that it may be real physics and we hoped that by this time we would have a truly significant effect," the ViXra Log's Philip Gibbs writes. "This has not happened."

Gibbs said that yet-to-be-released findings are said to throw even more cold water on the two-boson hypothesis. "This means that expectations of significant BSM [beyond Standard Model] effects from run 1 are now lower," he wrote.

Update for 4 p.m. ET: The consensus appears to be that the results presented at the Moriond conference firm up the Standard Model's view of the subatomic world — which is a bit of a disappointment for those hoping to see clear signs of new physics. "It may well be a 'vanilla Higgs,' though there are still hints of unseen sprinkles," Robert Garisto, editor of the Physical Review Letters, joked in a Twitter update.

"Vanilla" was also the word used by Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll in his Twitter assessment, although Harvard's Lisa Randall replied that there was still a chance of getting "vanilla swirl." On his "Not Even Wrong" blog, Columbia mathematician Peter Woit says it's looking like a "garden-variety [Standard Model] Higgs, which is discouraging for hopes of hints about how to get beyond the Standard Model."

The headline on Wired's report pretty much sums up the mood: "This Just In: Higgs Boson Still Boring."

More about the Higgs boson:

• Physicists to share latest word about Higgs quest
• Higgs-like particle may foretell end of universe
• Special report on the Large Hadron Collider

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Corbis

An artist's conception visualizes the big bang at the universe's beginning — or could it be the end?

BOSTON — If the "Higgs-like particle" discovered last year is really the long-sought Higgs boson, the bad news is that its mass suggests the universe will end in a fast-spreading bubble of doom. The good news? It'll probably be tens of billions of years before that particular doomsday arrives.

That's one of the weirder twists coming out of the continuing analysis of results from Europe's Large Hadron Collider, which produced the first solid evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson last year. Current theory holds that the Higgs boson plays a role in imparting mass to other fundamental particles. Confirming the discovery of the Higgs would fill in the last blank spot in that theory, known as the Standard Model.

Physicists discussed the state of the Higgs quest in Boston on Monday during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

So far, the particle that was found at the LHC fits all the requirements for the Higgs boson, but scientists aren't quite ready to confirm that the particle is really, truly the Higgs boson. It could be, say, just the first of multiple particles involved in the process. "The door is still very much open that there's [another] particle that has a role to play, or even more than that," said Christopher Hill, a physicist at Ohio State University who is also deputy physics coordinator for the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid experiment.

The LHC has just started a two-year shutdown for equipment upgrades — and Howard Gordon, deputy chair of the physics program at Brookhaven National Laboratory, said "it's going to take another few years" after the collider is restarted to confirm definitively that the newfound particle is the Higgs boson.

In the meantime, physicists have tightened their estimates of the particle's mass: Hill said the current estimate from the Compact Muon Solenoid is 125.8 billion electron volts, or 125.8 GeV, plus or minus 0.6 GeV. The figure from the LHC's other Higgs-boson detector, known as ATLAS, is 125.2 GeV, plus or minus 0.7 GeV.

Those figures can be factored into equations that point to the long-term fate of the universe, said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab.

So what's the outlook?

"If you use all the physics that we know now, and we do what we think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Lykken said. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable. At some point, billions of years from now, it's all going to be wiped out."

He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we're just at the edge of stability, in a "metastable" state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Nature that "without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away."

Lykken put it slightly differently: "The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us."

That alternate universe would be "much more boring," Lykken said. Which led him to ask a philosophical question: "Why do we live in a universe that's just on the edge of stability?" He wondered whether a universe has to be near the danger zone to produce galaxies, stars, planets ... and life.

Even Hill found it interesting that the parameters of particle physics put our universe right along the critical line. "That's something new, which we didn't know before, and which leads some of us to that there's something else coming," Hill said.

When Hill referred to "something else," he was talking about new discoveries in physics — not the end of the world. Lykken emphasized that it would be at least tens of billions of years before vacuum instability took hold.

"To get the exact number, we need more funding," he joked.

More about the fate of the universe:

• A bleak and lonely outlook for the universe
• Will time end in 3.7 billion years? Maybe, or maybe not
• Flash interactive: Beyond the big bang

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Slideshow: Building the biggest collider

Get a look inside the caverns and tunnels that house the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest atom-smasher.

Launch slideshow

After coming through with evidence for the long-sought Higgs Boson, Europe's Large Hadron Collider has begun a two-year "Long Shutdown," during which its underground components will be upgraded to run at even higher energies.

The last interacting particle beams were extracted from the machine at 7:24 a.m. Thursday Geneva time, the CERN nuclear physics center said in a news release. Most of the final beam runs were conducted with lead ions as well as protons, to study the conditions that existed in the universe just after the big bang. CERN said single-beam studies will wind down this weekend, and then the LHC's super-cooled components will be brought up to room temperature so that work can begin.

The "Long Shutdown 1," or LS1, marks the longest hiatus for the $10 billion collider since physics runs began in 2009.

"We have every reason to be very satisfied with the LHC’s first three years," CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said. "The machine, the experiments, the computing facilities and all infrastructures behaved brilliantly, and we have a major scientific discovery in our pocket."

That discovery, announced last July, was the detection of a new subatomic particle fitting the expected characteristics of the Higgs boson, the last big piece of the puzzle for particle physics' Standard Model. The Higgs boson is thought to play a role in producing the rest mass of fundamental particles. Physicists are continuing to analyze data from the LHC's detectors and are expected to provide further details about the new "Higgs-like particle" in the weeks and months ahead.

The LHC has been running at a top energy of 4 trillion electron volts, or 4 TeV per beam, but during the Long Shutdown, the facility's magnets and connections will be checked and upgraded to the point that it can run at its maximum design energy of 7 TeV per beam, starting in 2015. Problems with the LHC's magnets and connections bedeviled the collider during its construction phase: In 2008, a faulty connection caused an explosion that delayed the start of science operations for nearly a year. That incident led CERN to take a go-slower approach to ramping up the LHC's energy.

Other parts of the facility will be upgraded during Long Shutdown 1, ranging from CERN's proton synchrotrons to the ventilation system for the LHC's 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground tunnel. 

CERN

CERN details the upgrade work to be done at the LHC during 2013-14. Click on the graphic for a larger version.

Detecting the Higgs boson was the top goal for the LHC's thousands of scientists, engineers and support personnel. During the next phase of operations, researchers hope to tease out insights about other mysteries, such as the nature of dark matter, the possibility that all subatomic particles have as-yet-unseen supersymmetric partners, and the potential existence of extra dimensions of space. So far, the LHC's research teams have reported no evidence of such exotic phenomena, but they're hoping that higher energies will reveal "new physics" beyond the Standard Model.

Scientists won't be idle during the tunnel's shutdown: CERN's mass-storage systems are hanging onto 100 quadrillion bytes of data to analyze, most of which was acquired over the past year. CERN says that amount of data is equivalent to about 700 years' worth of HD-quality movies.

"There will be plenty of physics to do during LS1, and not only at the LHC," CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci said. "The LHC is the flagship of CERN's experimental program, but is nevertheless just one component of a very varied research infrastructure. All of the other experiments here have ongoing analyses, so I'm looking forward to many interesting results emerging as LS1 progresses."

More about the Large Hadron Collider:

• How to check the X Files of physics
• Is subatomic quest over? Stay tuned

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CERN file

The Large Hadron Collider, shown here during its construction phase, is the locale where physicists hope many of their most puzzling cases will be solved. But there are other mysteries to ponder in the cosmos.

They may not be on a par with alien goo or liver-eating mutants, but there's a whole collection of real-life X Files that physicists are puzzling over. Some cases eventually will be solved, like the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson. Some will fizzle out, like the case of the faster-than-light neutrinos. And some will baffle the boffins for years and years, like the mystery of dark energy.

Two sharp-eyed truth-squadders discussed how scientists investigate the X Files of physics — and how you can tell when a scientific case is really, truly closed — on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show hosted by yours truly on Wednesday.

Sean M. Carroll and Matt Strassler aren't FBI agents, although they could probably teach Fox Mulder and Dana Scully of "The X Files" a thing or two about critical thinking. They're theoretical physicists (Sean at Caltech, Matt at Rutgers) as well as accomplished writers and bloggers. Carroll is the author of several books, including "The Particle at the End of the Universe," his account of the Higgs boson search. Strassler performs reality checks on the Higgs quest and other big topics in physics on his blog, "Of Particular Significance."

What kinds of X Files are we talking about? Here a sampler:

• The possibility that dark-matter particles are knocking into each other at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, annihilating themselves and giving rise to strange gamma-ray emissions.
• The suggestion that there's an as-yet-unidentified fourth "flavor" of neutrinos, based on an unexplained excess of oscillations in data from Fermilab's MiniBooNE experiment. 
• The speculation that a massive wall of fire exists around the event horizon of every black hole, incinerating anything that falls toward the gravitational singularity. 
• The puzzle surrounding the size of the proton, which focuses on the fact that two different methods to measure the size have come up with different answers.

The proton problem is "one of those classic scientific puzzles where what's actually going on is probably some other type of issue in the experiment, or the interpretation of the experiment, that doesn't have anything to do with the radius of the proton," Strassler told me during our pre-show interview. "There's a small chance that it's something fundamental and really deep, but it's more likely to turn out to be some little detail."

That sort of thing goes on all the time in science, he said. In fact, some degree of uncertainty surrounds many of the experimental results produced by the scientific process. Professional scientists understand that's "par for the course," Strassler said. "The only thing that's unusual is the level of media attention."

Rutgers

Rutgers physicist Matt Strassler

Sean Carroll via Google+

Caltech physicist Sean Carroll

Are there any tricks of the trade that regular folks can use to figure out how to judge a scientific claim's solidity? Actually, there are plenty. But Strassler's top tip is to develop a better understanding of how news outlets work, and how scientific announcements work.

"We all know how to read advertisements. We know they're selling us something," he said. "But we don't necessarily know how to read an article on the front page of The New York Times or an article in Newsweek. They have a big, exciting topic, but when you look closely, you realize that it's only one person saying this. Or there's been one experiment that shows this. If there's only one, it may be nothing. It may go away."

Carroll said scientists themselves are getting into the public outreach field — either by blogging, as he does on Preposterous Universe, or by creating videos and other user-friendly materials about their research. "It'd be great if more scientists wanted to become regular contributors, to at least try to explain their most recent work," Carroll said.

"I can play devil's advocate on that one," Strassler said. "I worry about us generating so much information that no one's able to sift through and get to the meat of what we really know and what we don't." 

"That's a very interesting topic," Carroll replied. "There's a lot of information out there. In some sense, we could still use more, but it's a matter of finding it. That's the big challenge."

To find the podcast for Wednesday's show, just follow this link. You can also cruise through the "Virtually Speaking Science" podcast archives at BlogTalkRadio or iTunes, or click on the links below.

'Virtually Speaking Science' podcasts:

• Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on weird science in 2012
• Paul Doherty on the Curiosity mission and the year in science
• Shawn Lawrence Otto on the election and the climate issue
• Sean Carroll on what lies beyond the Higgs boson
• Alan Stern on the Uwingu mystery space venture
• George Djorgovski on the future of immersive virtual reality
• JPL's Dave Beaty previews Curiosity's mission on Mars
• SETI Institute's Seth Shostak about aliens and UFOs
• Paul Doherty on solar eclipses and the transit of Venus
• Veronica Ann Zabala-Aliberto on spaceflight and Yuri's Night
• JPL's Dave Beaty on the search for life on Mars
• Shawn Lawrence Otto on science and politics
• Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on silly science
• Rocket scientist Robert Zubrin on Mars exploration
• Propulsion expert Marc Millis on interstellar spaceflight
• Sean Carroll on the puzzling frontiers of physics
• Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
• Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
• George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
• Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
• Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
• Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

"Virtually Speaking Science" airs on Wednesdays on BlogTalkRadio. In addition to Alan Boyle, the hosts include Tom Levenson, director of MIT's graduate program in science writing; and Jennifer Ouellette, science writer and "Cocktail Party Physics" blogger.

First published at 7:08 p.m. ET Feb. 6, last updated at 10:30 p.m. ET.

Francois Nascimbeni / AFP - Getty Images

French researcher Gerard Liger-Belair works on a glass of champagne in his laboratory in Reims, located in the Champagne region in eastern France.

If you really want to impress your bubbly-sipping friends tonight, be sure to chill a big bottle of Champagne to somewhere between 39 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit (4 to 9 degrees Celsius), bring out the narrow glasses (not those wide plastic cups!) and pour the stuff gently down the angled side of the glass like beer.

This is the scientific way to treat Champagne sparkling wine, based on research conducted over the years by Gerard Liger-Belair, a physicist at the University of Reims in France's Champagne region. His studies on the behavior of bubbly — including high-speed photography of popping bubbles and infrared imaging of carbon dioxide flow — have made him the world's highest-profile expert on Champagne science.

It's a tough job — but somebody's gotta do it.

"I love the beauties behind bubble science," Liger-Belair said in an email. "Since I became a scientist, many people have remarked that I seem to have landed the best job in all of physics, since my research on bubbles requires that I work in a lab stocked with top-notch Champagne — and I'd be inclined to agree."

For Liger-Belair and his colleagues, it's mostly about the bubbles. To be sure, there's much more to sparkling wine than the sparkle: As many as 80 different vintages of wine may be blended together to create one batch of Champagne using the traditional process. A small amount of yeast and sugar is added, and the bottles are sealed up for fermentation. Months later, the yeast sediment is blown out through the bottle's neck — and then the bottle is quickly corked up and wired shut.

Liger-Belair's research focuses on what happens next, when the cork is popped off. The CO2 that was created through the fermentation process bubbles out of the wine — tickling the nose with a fizzy aerosol of alcohol and flavorful ingredients known as volatile organic compounds. The more CO2 that can be liberated after the champagne is poured into the glass, the better.

That's where science comes into play. Liger-Belair and his colleagues recently reported that larger bottles of Champagne retain more CO2 in the wine as it's being poured into the glasses. So if you have a choice between several small bottles and fewer big bottles, go for the big ones. But be sure those bottles are well-chilled: Warm champagne loses its CO2 quickly as it's being poured, leaving less to fizz up out of the glass.

Speaking of the glass: Liger-Belair's team determined that tall, narrow-rimmed flutes produce a better effect than the wide-rimmed "coupes" that folks more typically associate with sparkling wine. That's because the CO2 rises out of a wide-rimmed glass too quickly, over a wider surface area. Also, glass flutes are better than plastic cups, and not just for aesthetic reasons: The plastic material is hydrophobic — that is, liquid-repellent — which means the bubbles are more likely to adhere to the sides of the cup and less likely to contribute to a nice fizz.

If you really want to get your fizz on, wash your glasses before the party and dry them with a towel rather than letting them air-dry: The microscopic fibers of cellulose that are left inside the glass actually contribute to bubble production. Some glass-makers add tiny scratches to their Champagne glasses to create pleasing patterns of bubbles, and you can feel free to experiment with the same technique. (Just not with the expensive glassware.)

When it comes to the pouring, don't splash the Champagne straight down into the bottom of the glass. Instead, trickle it down the side, like beer. That preserves more of the carbon dioxide for the bubbles that rise while you're drinking the wine. "The beer-like way of serving champagne much less impacts its dissolved CO2 concentration than the Champagne-like way of serving it, and especially at low Champagne temperatures (4 degrees C and 12 degrees C)," Liger-Belair reported.

Liger-Belair has laid out many more findings about Champagne in a decade's worth of research papers — and in his book, "Uncorked: The Science of Champagne," which is being updated with the latest revelations for a new edition. One of his recent papers, an 88-page survey written for the European Physical Journal, is available for free download today.

Here's a sampling of sparkling facts: 

• There are six bottles' worth of gaseous CO2 packed into every bottle of Champagne.
• A significant amount of that CO2 leaks out of the bottle through the cork. Liger-Belair's study of Champagne bottled in the 1990s suggested that almost a third of the CO2 could be lost over the course of 15 years. "Because the size of bubbles is linked with the level of dissolved CO2 in Champagne, bubbles get thinner over time when Champagne ages," Liger-Belair said.
• The higher the wine's temperature, the bigger the "pop" when the cork is released. That's because the CO2 pressure increases with temperature. Some folks might keep their Champagne warm to maximize the pop, but be careful: A popped cork can travel as fast as 50 mph (80 kilometers per hour). Every year, the American Academy of Opthalmology warns that sparkling-wine corks rank among the top holiday-related eye hazards — and provides tips for proper cork removal.
• Only 5 percent of the pop goes toward the cork's kinetic energy. Most of the rest goes toward generating the popping sound's shock wave. The pattern of CO2 that's set loose when the cork is popped is similar to the mushroom cloud created by an exploding atom bomb.
• If you see a white wisp of mist rising from a just-popped bottle, that's not carbon dioxide. That's a fog of ethanol and water vapor, triggered by the sudden drop in gas temperature when the pressure is released. (That's what's known as adiabatic expansion.) 

It might seem frivolous to devote so much attention to the physics of fizz, but Liger-Belair said his research is about much more than your single bottle of bubbly on New Year's Eve.

"In fact, bubbles are a fantastic example of bubble dynamics in general, and studies dealing with champagne bubbles can be extended to many other areas where bubbles play a role, in natural as well as industrial processes. For example, marine aerosols created by bursting bubbles behave like champagne's bursting bubbles. ... The scales are different, but the basic principles are identical," he said in his email.

Liger-Belair's research at the University of Reims is generally funded by enological and agricultural programs in France and Europe — such as L'Association Recherche Oenologique Champagne et Universit

é, which was created to boost the Champagne region's best-known industr

y.

"As far as champagne is concerned, 350 million bottles sold per year all over the world deserve particular attention. The job may seem fun indeed, as any job made with passion should be," Liger-Belair said. "I am aware that devoting so much energy to studying champagne bubbles may seem 'weird,' but the implications of bubble dynamics are universal."

So just before you take a sip of cool, sparkling beverage from your towel-dried flute, raise a toast to Liger-Belair ... and the science of champagne.

Update for 12:45 p.m. ET: Legend has it that the wide-rimmed, bowl-like champagne coupe was modeled after the breast of Marie Antoinette (or the Empress Josephine, or Helen of Troy ...), but Snopes.com says there's no truth to the legend. 

More about the science of alcoholic drinks:

• Sip some New Year's Eve science
• How to pour that drink, scientifically
• The why behind a wine's bouquet
• Future happy hour with high-tech cocktails

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

As 2012 draws to a close, physicists are celebrating — and being celebrated for — the end of a four-decade scientific quest to find a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. The discovery, made at the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider and reported in July, won honors this week as Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year as well as a piece of the spotlight in Time magazine's Person of the Year package.

But the story of what some have nicknamed "the God particle" isn't over yet. (Physicists hate that nickname, by the way.)

"This particle has the potential to be a portal to a new landscape of physical phenomena that is still hidden from us," the scientific team behind the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid detector writes in a Science paper that lays out the details behind the discovery.

That sentiment comes through as well in another paper from the LHC's ATLAS collaboration, which found results consistent with those from the CMS detector. The ATLAS scientists say finding the particle appears to provide the "last missing piece" in the Standard Model, the scientific theory that explains the subatomic realm — but also sets the stage for further studies "to explore the physics that must lie beyond" the Standard Model.

Both teams said they detected a particle that matched the quarry they sought, with a mass in the range of 125 billion electron volts. But they haven't yet quite confirmed that its characteristics fully conform with the theoretical particle that was proposed in the 1960s to fill in the Standard Model's remaining gaps.

CERN / ATLAS Experiment

This schematic shows the pattern of subatomic particle tracks associated with a candidate event for the detection of the Higgs boson.

That particle would help explain why some fundamental particles, such as the W and Z bosons, possess mass — while others, such as photons, don't. Physicists can see that such a mechanism must exist; otherwise, the cosmos just wouldn't work. The problem is figuring out how the mechanism is structured. The Higgs boson, and its associated Higgs field, fills the bill.

There's still some question whether the new particle reported this year is the Higgs boson, as described in the traditional Standard Model, or part of a more complex Higgs mechanism that may include other particles. Last week, there was a brief kerfuffle over whether the data from ATLAS hinted at two Higgs particles — but as of now, the leading view is that those hints are just statistical fluctuations that will eventually disappear. The definitive word is expected to come at a conference in March.

By that time, the LHC will be shut down for a major upgrade. The particle collider, housed in a 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva, has been running at energies of up to 8 trillion electron volts — but the upgrade will allow it to operate at 13 to 14 TeV starting in 2015. That's when the really way-out discoveries, relating to mysteries such as supersymmetry or the nature of dark matter, could come to light.

Why should we care about the Higgs boson? It may not bring us a better iPhone next year — but a better understanding of fundamental physics typically leads to better applications down the line. Just ask the inventors of medical scanners, microwave ovens or laser devices. For more on the practical implications of research at the LHC, check out our interactive interview with physicist Michio Kaku.

The same disclaimer goes for Science's runner-up breakthroughs of the year. You may not see how some of these discoveries can relate to everyday life — but someday, you or your children will:

Unraveling the Denisovan genome: In late 2010, anthropologists used genetic tools to discover a new type of human ancestor that lived in Siberia tens of thousands of years ago, dubbed the Denisovans. This year, they used a new technique to compare the Denisovan genome with those of modern-day populations — and confirmed that some parts of the Denisovan genetic heritage were passed on. That's right, kids: Our ancestors did it with Denisovans. The new technique is expected to yield a high-quality version of the Neanderthal genome in 2013.

Making eggs from stem cells: Japanese researchers coaxed mouse stem cells into becoming viable eggs that produce healthy offspring. There are a few caveats: The eggs still have to be hosted by an actual mouse during one stage of their maturation, and the technique doesn't yet work with human cells. But the project represents another significant step in the fight against infertility.

Curiosity's landing system: Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Curiosity rover's landing on Mars in August was that a system designed to lower the rover from a rocket-powered, hovering platform actually worked. NASA engineers acknowledged that the idea seemed crazy but insisted it was the "least crazy" way to get the 1-ton payload safely to the surface. The "sky crane" concept worked so well that NASA plans to do it again in 2020. For more about the Curiosity mission, check out our "Year in Space" roundup.

X-ray laser reveals protein structure: Scientists used intense, ultra-short X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser to collect data on the 3-D structure of proteins — and single-shot images of an intact virus. "The grand goal is to push X-ray diffraction to its ultimate limit and use an X-ray laser to decipher a protein structure by zapping individual molecules," Science's editors write.

Precision engineering of genomes: If you haven't heard about TALENs and CRISPR yet, you will — at least if genetic engineering is your thing. These are new tools for "editing" the genomes of creatures ranging from zebrafish to rats and crickets. Even human cells are being tweaked for research purposes. "Some researchers now think TALENs [transcription activator-like effector nucleases] will become standard procedure for all molecular biology labs," the editors say.

Majorana fermions detected, sort of: Seventy-five years ago, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana theorized that a weird type of subatomic particle existed that could act as its own antiparticle. This year, Dutch physicists reported tentative signs that the particles have at last been detected. If their existence is confirmed, Majorana fermions would have properties that make them perfectly suited for quantum computing.

ENCODE zooms in on human genome: After a decade of research, a $288 million project to trace all the threads that make up the human genome issued a blizzard of scientific papers. The studies suggested that only a small percentage of our DNA is wrapped up in our genes. At the time, much was made of the fact that what was once called "junk DNA" plays an important role in our genetic makeup. But we knew that already, right? The important thing is that Project ENCODE ("Encyclopedia of DNA Elements") has made a grand start toward reading, and understanding, our book of life.

Better brain-machine interfaces: Is the "Star Trek" nightmare vision of the Borg coming to pass? Not yet: We are not being assimilated into machinery. But in the future, it should become easier for us to assimilate machinery when the need arises. Researchers are perfecting techniques for controlling artificial limbs, computers or other devices with our thoughts alone. Someday even physicist Stephen Hawking might benefit from mind-reading systems.  

A new door in neutrino physics: Researchers caught a rare type of exotic particle known as an electron antineutrino in the act of disappearing, at an experimental facility in China — and that vanishing trick provided yet another long-sought puzzle piece in subatomic physics. The researchers said they measured the last parameter describing how different types of neutrinos morph into each other. For what it's worth, that parameter, the mixing angle known as theta13, equals 8.8 degrees, plus or minus 0.8 degrees. The fact that the value isn't zero could help explain why there's so much matter and so little antimatter in our universe.

Frontiers for 2013: In addition to 2012's breakthroughs, Science's editors highlighted six scientific areas to watch in 2013: single-cell DNA sequencing, the Planck probe's study of the cosmic microwave background, the Human Connectome Project, ultra-deep ice drilling at Antarctica's Lake Vostok, cancer immunotherapy research and basic plant research.

More about the Higgs quest:

• How will Nobel Prizes handle Higgs hassle?
• Comics go beyond the Higgs boson
• Gallery: Your guide to the particle zoo
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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.