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.

NASA / JPL / Cornell

When some people look at this nine-year-old picture from NASA's Spirit rover, they see a graphic depiction of manhood. Actually, it's standard operating procedure for making a turn on Mars.

Some Mars maniacs just won't grow up: A picture of the track patterns left behind by the Mars rovers' standard turning maneuver has drawn giggles and gasps — merely because it looks like a penis scrawled on the Red Planet.

"The rude drawing has emerged in a series of images taken by one of its rover machines. ... The latest pictures beamed back from one of the rovers show signs that the project's controllers have started to get a bit bored," The Sun, a British tabloid, reported on Wednesday.

Even Sarcastic Rover, one of Twitter's top parody personas, got into the act: "Since everyone's asking, let me just say that some other robot did this ... definitely not me," it tweeted.

The jibes from Sarcastic Rover and The Sun, and tons more like them, were sparked by a Reddit forum's discovery of the picture the day before. But this picture isn't the product of a bored (or filthy-minded) rover driver, and it wasn't beamed down recently. It's part of a classic nine-year-old panorama from NASA's Spirit rover, looking back toward its landing platform. (You can actually see the platform in the high-resolution version of the panorama.)

This type of rover wheel-track pattern, which could euphemistically be called "a bat and two balls," has been left on Mars many times, not only by Spirit (which gave up the ghost in 2010 or so), but also by Opportunity (which is still going strong more than nine years after landing on Mars) and Curiosity (which landed last year).

All those rovers have six wheels, three on each side, and they leave behind two parallel tracks when they're traveling in a straight line. When the rover has to make a turn, the wheels rotate in place to put the robot in the desired direction for the next leg of its trek. If the turn is significant enough, you get a nice set of circles at the end of a pair of parallel tracks.

Got it? Now we can move on — for instance, to lewd pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA / ESA / STScI / AURA / La Plata Obs.

A sub-cloud of dust in the Carina Nebula displays what some have called "the cosmic finger of friendship."

More tracks from the Red Planet:

• That's one small step ... on Mars?
• Curiosity leaves tracks in Morse code
• 3-D adds depth to tracks on Mars

Tip o' the Log to Jia-Rui Cook at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for finding the original Spirit panorama from Mars.

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

Apollo 10 astronauts Gene Cernan and Tom Stafford go through procedures during a pre-launch simulation. One procedure in particular created a bit of trouble during the mission in May 1969.

Bathroom rituals in outer space are a perennial favorite, particularly when they go wrong — as evidenced by the latest wave of hilarity over the runaway poop that prompted rude remarks during the Apollo 10 round-the-moon mission in 1969.

A 500-page-plus transcript of the declassified mission log records tons of routine conversations among the mission's three astronauts: commander Tom Stafford, lunar module pilot Gene Cernan and command module pilot John Young. But six days into the eight-day mission, around page 414, an emergency pops up:

"Give me a napkin, quick," Stafford says. "There's a turd floating through the air."

"I didn't do it," Young says. "It ain't one of mine."

"I don't think it's one of mine," Cernan says.

"Mine was a little more sticky than that," Stafford replies. "Throw that away."

The astronauts discuss the finer points of waste disposal in space, and then move on to other business. But minutes later, it's "Houston, we have a problem" all over again.

"Here's another goddam turd," Cernan says. "What's the matter with you guys?"

The Apollo astronauts had a rudimentary system for disposing of solid waste — basically, by doing their business in a bag, sealing up the bag, kneading it to mix in disinfectant, and then putting the whole thing in a waste receptacle. The process required "a great deal of skill," a post-Apollo NASA review reported. Obviously, some steps must have been missed on occasion.

"In general, the Apollo waste management system worked satisfactorily from an engineering standpoint," according to the biomedical review. "From the point of view of crew acceptance, however, the system must be given poor marks."

The International Space Station provides more commodious commodes, with suction systems that help astronauts deal with zero-G toiletry. There are still usability challenges, however, as space passenger Richard Garriott explained in this 2010 video.

Some reports have suggested that the transcript describing Apollo 10's "Close Encounters of the Turd Kind" was released just recently, but it's actually been declassified for decades. The 44-year-old conversation sparked a new round of giggles over the past week, due to its renewed exposure on The Straight Dope, Laughing Squid, Reddit and elsewhere. You'll find lots more rude talk in the Apollo 10 transcript if you look hard enough — and if you need a little help, Distractions in Space stands ready to lend a hand. So to speak.

More rude space subjects:

• How to use a space toilet
• How not to be a space slob
• Sex in space will be complicated

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.

Kickstarter

Supporters of the Kickstarter campaign to build a fleet of X-wing fighters raised $721,036, while a competing campaign to design a Death Star battle station raised 328,613 British pounds, or just under $500,000. None of the supporters had to pay up, however, because the campaigns finished up far short of their funding goals.

Sorry, "Star Wars" fans: A real-life Death Star and the X-wing fighters to bring it down won't be built anytime soon. First the White House snubbed a petition calling on the government to build the Death Star. Now two Kickstarter projects aimed at building a fully operational battle station as well as an X-wing fleet have fallen far short of their multimillion-dollar funding goals.

That means nobody is out any money, which probably comes as a huge relief to those who pledged their backing to the joke projects.

Both the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance have something to brag about: The Death Star project, associated with Nick Petkovich's Gnut.co.uk in Britain, won pledges from 2,388 backers amounting to £328,613, or just under a half-million dollars. The X-wing fund-raiser, created by Simon Kwan in Shanghai, had fewer backers but raised more money — $721,036, to be exact.

"While we didn't meet meet our funding goal, we soundly beat the amount raised by the Empire for their Death Star!" Kwan wrote. "Take THAT, Dark Side ;-P"

The final tallies when the campaigns concluded on April Fools' Day would send most Kickstarter project creators over the moon, but the way Kickstarter's fund-raising system works, the creators can't cash in on those pledges unless the project goal is met. The goals were set high on purpose — about $30 million for the Death Star, and $11 million for the X-wing fighter fleet — so that backers could get in on the joke while staying off the hook for the money.

Even if they raised $30 million, that sum wouldn't even be enough to buy just the protective covers for a real-life Death Star's thermal exhaust ports, or a single sub-light propulsion thrust engine for an X-wing fighter. In the real world, the cost of building the comparatively puny, 450-ton International Space Station has been estimated at upwards of $100 billion. The estimated development cost for NASA's next-generation launch system is in the neighborhood of $35 billion. And for that price, you don't even get laser cannons.

A while back, college students calculated that it'd cost $852 quadrillion just to buy the steel for an armed and fully operational Death Star. Transterrestrial Musings' Rand Simberg says that estimate is grossly inflated — but in any case, Darth Vader would find the lack of Kickstarter funds disturbing.

More about futuristic spaceships:

• Starship Enterprise petition fizzles
• Realities almost keep pace with sci-fi
• Petition puts nuclear rocket in spotlight 

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.

MSNBC TV

The classic rock-paper-scissors game encourages a strategy of second-guessing. In this particular showdown, "rock" (the closed fist) beats "scissors" (the forked fingers). "Paper" is represented by an open palm.

When people try to second-guess a rival, they don't eighth-guess or ninth-guess them: Using a glorified version of the classic rock-paper-scissors game, researchers have found that players tend to converge on a strategy of thinking around two steps ahead.

They say their findings could shed light on other pursuits where rivals have to engage in cycles of second-guessing — including fashion trends, political campaigns and the financial markets.

"Anticipation may be the motor that keeps fads running in cycles," Seth Frey, a doctoral candidate studying psychology and brain science at Indiana University, said in a news release. "It could be a source of the violent swings that we see in financial markets. Anyone in a bidding war on eBay may have been caught in this dynamic. If the bidders are tweaking their increasing bids based on the tweaks of others, then the whole group may converge in price and determine how those prices rise. The process isn't governed by the intrinsic value of that mint-condition Star Wars lunch box, but on the collective dynamics of people trying to reason through each other's thoughts."

Frey and Robert Goldstone, who directs the Percepts and Concepts Laboratory at Indiana University, designed a laboratory experiment designed to find out how strategies changed over repeated cycles. They decided against the relatively limited repertoire of rock-paper-scissors — the hand-flashing game in which scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, and rock dulls scissors. Instead, they used a guessing game in which players guess a number between 1 and 24. A player wins a point when he or she guesses a number exactly one step higher than another competitor. There's one exception: 1 beats 24.

During 22 sessions at the university, 123 psychology students participated in the "Mod Game," in small groups. Each point that was won in the game earned a player 10 cents.

The results were published online by the journal PLOS ONE on Monday. Players could have simply guessed random numbers during each round, but that's not what happened. Over the course of repeated guessing games, the players tended to fall into the pattern of raising their guesses in a cluster that cycled through all the choices. The behavior suggested that players tried to guess what their rivals were guessing about their guess. In a video, Frey compared the pattern to a famous poisoning scene in the movie "The Princess Bride."

As the guessing games continued, the speed of the cycling accelerated. After 200 rounds, the rate of cycling gradually reached an average of 2.35 "thinking steps," Frey and Goldstone reported. They suggested that a synchronicity in the guessing was beneficial for the group as a whole, because the players earned no payoff if they thought too far ahead.

"At a core level, people's guesses do converge, and that's interesting because dominant models suggest otherwise," Goldstone said in the news release. "Even though people are trying to beat each other out, they end up in synchronicity."

More about the science of rock-paper-scissors:

• Rock-paper-scissors robot will beat you every time
• Science reveals how to win at rock-paper-scissors
• Judge orders rock-paper-scissors to decide dispute

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.

Jean-Philippe Arles / Reuters

Residents dressed as extraterrestrials with green-painted faces walk the streets of Bugarach, France, which was touted as a safe haven from the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012.

The hype over last month's supposed Maya doomsday has won honors as the weirdest science story of the past year — and although there wasn't all that much science to the claim that the ancient culture's calendar foretold the end of the world, the whole episode was a classic example of people putting too much faith in way-out calculations.

"A year before that, we gave one of our prizes to a whole bunch of people who made specific prediction about when the world would end," said Marc Abrahams, who heads up the Ig Nobel Prize program for silly science. The big lesson? "When you make mathematical calculations, you should check your assumptions," Abrahams told me.

Abrahams and I sifted through the scientific silliness of the past year, including the Maya non-apocalypse, tonight on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show on BlogTalkRadio online and in the Second Life virtual world. If you missed the live webcast, don't worry: You can catch up with the podcast by checking out the archive on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes.

How did the hubbub surrounding the Maya calendar get started? It began decades ago with the suggestion that the ancient Maya may have seen the end of their 5,125-year-long cycle of creation as the opening for a cosmic Armageddon. Although archaeologists have shot down that hypothesis, the idea persisted — and got mixed up with other end-of-the-world ideas.

Abrahams suspects that the idea got a push from folks who could profit from a little doomsday buzz: "Some people made money on it — especially people who wrote books about it or made TV shows about it. The prediction certainly did have monetary value for a few people."

The Internet served a dual role in all this: The bad thing about the Internet is that it's easy for someone to make a way-out claim in some dark corner of the Web — whether we're talking about ancient calendars or alien-looking space blobs. The good thing is that there are lots of knowledgeable sources willing to do a reality check on remarkable claims. That applies not only to doomsday myths, but also to more strictly scientific issues such as the potential for arsenic-based life or the existence of extraterrestrial microbes.

"When some piece of news gets out there about scientific discoveries, almost always that's the start of some long messy conversation between lots and lots of people," Abrahams observed. "They're almost immediately looking things up and arguing about something they actually saw, rather than something they heard tenth-hand. That's something new for the world. There's a lot of nonsense that gets shot down a lot earlier than it did before."

Some of the other stories that made the top-10 list for the 2013 Weird Science Awards may sound almost nonsensical — but for the most part, they're way more substantive. That's the key indicator for the kind of scientific silliness that Abrahams is interested in for the Ig Nobels: "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." Take a look at the list, then tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" for a few laughs — and maybe a few deep thoughts as well:

2013 Weirdie winners:

• Maya apocalypse fizzles out
• Sex-starved flies drown woes in alcohol
• Bizarre fish has penis on its head 
• Is reality 'unreal'? Scientists aim to find out
• DNA report claims that Bigfoot is part human
• Scientists make brain cells from urine
• Zoo chimp devises elaborate plots to attack humans
• 'Alien'-like skulls unearthed in ancient cemetery
• Bizarre turtles pee from their mouths
• Help out researchers: Send them your poop

Still more weird science:

• Check out all 30 nominees for the 2013 Weirdies
• 10 weirdest animal discoveries of 2012
• 10 stories that made us blush in 2012
• A dozen obvious findings for 2012
• 2012 Weird Science Awards
• 2011 Weird Science Awards
• 2010 Weird Science Awards
• 2009 Weird Science Awards
• 2008 Weird Science Awards

More podcasts from 'Virtually Speaking Science':

• 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

"Virtually Speaking Science" is hosted in Second Life by the Exploratorium. Theoretical physicists Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler will be my guests on Feb. 6 for a show about the frontiers of physics.

 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.

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.

Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and the Apocalypse: 2012 had it all. But only 10 stories about the past year's strangest scientific research can make it into our Weird Science hall of fame — so we're going to need your help.

Past winners of the Weird Science Awards include glow-in-the-dark kittens and puppies, a 2,700-year-old marijuana stash, meth-crazy fruit flies, reattached rabbit penises and the corpse-dissolving machine. The Maya apocalypse came in for honorable mention last year and the year before, but this could be an even bigger year for end-of-the-world weirdness.

There are lots of other contenders from 2012, however. It's hard to beat the story about the sex-starved flies who drowned their sorrows in alcohol while researchers watched. That covers sex and drugs. It also can make you feel sorry for the scientists who had to watch all that fly-sized heartbreak. (They might want to compare notes with the researchers who studied why alcohol makes people feel good.)

The sixth annual Weird Science Award competition follows the precedent we've set in past years: We offer up 30 nominees from the past year, and it's up to you to pick the top 10. We've included a couple of studies that have won Ig Nobel awards — which are given annually to recognize "research that makes people laugh — and then think." That's a fine criterion for the Weirdies as well. Or you can go with research that makes you laugh — and then makes you wonder, "What on earth were they thinking?"

Write-in votes and second-guessing are encouraged; you can register them in your comments. If a write-in vote gets enough support from commenters, the research in question will be added to the ballot.

The 10 nominees that get the most votes as of noon ET Jan. 2 will be the 2013 winners of the Weirdy Awards. Later that day, we'll discuss this year's crop of weird science with Ig Nobel creator Marc Abrahams on "Virtually Speaking Science," a talk show that plays out on the Web and in the Second Life virtual world. Tune in at 9 p.m. ET Jan. 2.

Johan Ordonez / AFP - Getty Images

Maya shamans take part in a ceremony on Dec. 21, celebrating the end of the calendar cycle known as Baktun 13 - and the end of the hype over a 2012 doomsday. Click on the image to watch a video about the phenomenon.

Here are the nominees, in chronological order. May the oddest science stories be ever in your favor!

Leonardo da Vinci ... fashion designer?
'Rapunzel Number' brings math to ponytails
Legless amphibians could win weirdness prize
Sex-starved flies drown woes in alcohol
Earliest painting of transvestite uncovered
Zoo chimp devises elaborate plots to attack humans
Ancient 'Loch Ness monster' suffered from arthritis
MIT engineers solve stuck ketchup problem
Rock music compared to animal distress calls
Turtles' sex act frozen in time
Scientists explain why people wear pants
Three-hour sex sessions exhaust squid
Shark teeth have built-in toothpaste
Bizarre fish has penis on its head 
Researchers create a sneeze-free geranium
Scientists figure out why coffee spills
How physics can tilt the odds in roulette
Mice can change their (ultrasonic) tune
Bizarre turtles pee from their mouths
Puppies learn to catch yawns as they grow
'Finding Nemo' fish talk their way out of a fight
750-legged millipede sets world record
DNA report claims that Bigfoot is part human
Help out researchers: Send them your poop
Scientists make brain cells from urine
Is reality 'unreal'? Scientists aim to find out
Did magic mushrooms inspire Santa saga?
Maya apocalypse fizzles out
'Alien'-like skulls unearthed in ancient cemetery
Scientists unravel secret behind Rudolph's red nose

Still more weird science:

• 10 weirdest animal discoveries of 2012
• 10 stories that made us blush in 2012
• A dozen obvious findings for 2012
• 2012 Weird Science Awards
• 2011 Weird Science Awards
• 2010 Weird Science Awards
• 2009 Weird Science Awards
• 2008 Weird Science Awards

For more serious looks back at 2012, check out The Year in Science and The Year in Space, as well as our Year in Space slideshow.

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.

20th Century Fox

Let's face it: Funding a Death Star would push the federal budget off the fiscal cliff and into a fiscal Death Valley.

The 25,000-plus signers of a "We the People" petition calling on the federal government to start building a Death Star by 2016 must be feeling as peppy as the Rebel Alliance, now that they've put their plea over the threshold that will trigger a response from the White House.

Campaigns on 4chan, Reddit and Twitter helped put it over the top with a day to spare. This means someone at the White House will have to take a good look at the Death Star issue and draw up a response (unless officials decide it would be improper to speak out on something that's more appropriately addressed by, say, the Defense Department, NASA or Lord Vader).

The rationale for securing the funding and resources to start construction was laid out in the petition, created on Nov. 14 by John D. of Longmont, Colo: "By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense."

Building the kind of moon-sized Death Star portrayed in the "Star Wars" saga would be a heck of a stimulus program, however. Earlier this year, Centives calculated the cost of the steel alone at $852 quadrillion, or roughly 13,000 times the world's gross domestic product. At the current rate of production, it would take more than 833,000 years to produce enough steel to begin work.

I'm afraid the White House's political deflector shield will be quite operational when that petition arrives.

Administration officials have had a lot of practice dealing with "We the People" petitions that address far-out topics like the Death Star: Last year, for instance, two petitions calling for full disclosure on extraterrestrial visitations reached the standard requiring a response, and the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy rose to the challenge.

"The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race," OSTP's Phil Larson reported on the WhiteHouse.gov website. "In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye."

I'm hoping that the Death Star petition will provide an opportunity for Larson and his colleagues to come up with a pithier, more creative response ... maybe something that will satisfy the fanboys. Here are a few examples that have popped up over the past few days:

• "The farce is strong in this one." (Commenter on The Ticket)
• "We find its lack of signatures disturbing" (MSNBC's Ed Schultz)
• "We have a bad feeling about this" (Modern Man)

Which "Star Wars" cliches would be most fitting for the task? Try to think of some suggestions you can leave in the comment space below. On second thought, try not. Do, or do not. There is no "try."

More on the Death Star and other petitions:

• White House petitions range from serious to silly
• How the online petition program got started
• Management lesson: Don't rebuild the Death Star
• How much would the Death Star cost?

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.

Xavier Jenks (Domatron Graves)

A picture from NASA's Curiosity rover was retouched for a spoof website to look as if Mardi Gras beads were lying on the Martian surface. The whitish-gray object visible in the center of the picture is an actual scrap of plastic that came from Curiosity and was spotted on the ground.

For a while, it almost looked as if NASA was really spilling the beans — or rather, the beads — about the Curiosity rover's hush-hush discoveries on Mars. And that was precisely the problem.

A spoof website, NASAUpdateCenter.us, made a splash on Thursday by proclaiming that Curiosity discovered "small spheres" that turned out to be made of plastic. The purported press release drew heavily on the logos and page design used by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was accompanied by a picture showing strings of the tiny spheres — which looked suspiciously like Mardi Gras necklaces.

Curiosity's science team is scheduled to provide an eagerly awaited update on the rover mission at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco on Monday. Some of the initial news reports suggested the scientists were getting ready to announce a discovery that would be "one for the history books." (On Thursday, NASA said such "rumors and speculation" were incorrect.)

"I basically thought that with all the hype NASA made last week about an earthshaking release, we could build off that hype and set off the story before them," Domatron Graves, a.k.a. Xavier Jenks, explained in an email. Graves, who told me he's a 25-year-old Mardi Gras production artist and "publicity stuntman" from New Orleans, was the prime mover behind the "plastic beads" prank.

The website was meant as a joke, and as a sly marketing campaign for Graves' Mardi Gras team, the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus. Hence the plastic beads. One of the pages on the site even featured a "Face on Mars" picture that morphed into the furry visage of Chewbacca from the Star Wars saga.

The way Graves tells the story, NASA wasn't amused. He said he received a phone call from someone claiming to be from JPL, informing him that his use of the space agency's logos was a federal offense. Graves and his Web team had the bogus "press release" taken down by 1 p.m. ET today.

"I'm trying not to go to jail," he told me over the phone.

I haven't yet been able to track down exactly who spoke with him. Bert Ulrich, who serves as a multimedia liaison at NASA Headquarters in Washington, told me he wasn't aware that anyone from the agency contacted Graves. "It's news to us," he wrote in an email.

There is a law on the books that forbids the unauthorized use of NASA's official logos and program identifiers (14 CFR 1221), backed up by the threat of a six-month jail term (18 USC 701). But it's unlikely that NASA would actually pursue prosecution — and even if the agency did prosecute, you could argue that Graves and his pals would be protected by policies governing fair use and parody. In any case, that argument is now moot.

One of the issues might have been that the look and feel of the fake press release was so serious, even though the claim was clearly ridiculous. Real names were used in the wrong contexts, and the claims were couched in terms typically used to describe Mars' truly weird blueberries. It'd take a sharp observer (like Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait) to see right away that the whole thing was baloney.

The full text of the bogus press release has been taken down, but you can get a sense of the tone from this screenshot:

Xavier Jenks (Domatron Graves)

This is not a NASA news release, but because of the way it was presented on a spoof website, some people thought it actually came from NASA.

NASA is one of the more trusted agencies in the federal government, although surveys suggest that trust has fallen in recent years. The hubbub over Martian discoveries is particularly sensitive, in light of the misunderstandings surrounding what Curiosity has or has not found so far. So it's understandable that the space agency might not appreciate a spoof that gave the wrong impression — as opposed to a spoof like the "We're NASA and We Know It" viral video, which celebrates the Curiosity mission's true accomplishments.

If Graves had been able to hold out a little bit longer, he would have added some references to the Mardi Gras krewe's home page — to signal that the website was a spoof and generate a little online traffic for Chewbacchus. That's what he did in the case of the New Orleans Bigfoot Society, another prank website that he and his friends cooked up last year. But after the hurried removal of the faux NASA Web pages, the spoof website has been reduced to a text-only page with a Web link paying tribute to "the Sacred Drunken Wookiee!"

Let's just hope Lucasfilm doesn't go after Graves for copyright infringement. NASA's displeasure is nothing, compared to the wrath of the "Star Wars" empire.

Update for 10:30 p.m. ET: Veronica McGregor, who manages the news and social media office at JPL, sent me an email that filled in most of the remaining gaps in the story. "What I know about the site is, the manager/owner was contacted," she wrote. "The content on the site was not a concern, in fact we've truly enjoyed all of the spoofs out there. As you mentioned, it was the use of the page design, name and logos — and the possibility of confusion — that was the concern. ... We didn't think people would be confused over the beads, just the page design."  

Update for 8:25 p.m. ET Dec. 3: The NASAUpdateCenter.us website is back with lots of graphics, but none of the NASA elements that got Graves in trouble. 

More whimsy about the Curiosity rover on Mars:

• LaughPong via YouTube: Cool things to find
• Sat. Morning Breakfast Cereal: How NASA announcements work
• Weird plastic object traced to Mars rover
• More real news about Curiosity's mission

Graves acknowledges that the "Domatron" in his name is a nom d'art, but he insists that the last name is real. "I'm a Graves," he told me. I found his contact information by tracing the domain-registration listing for NASAUpdateCenter.us, and reached him by phone just as he was arranging for the faux press release to be taken down.

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.