When the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, champagne bottles get popped all around the world.
So what is it exactly that sends that cork flying? And what's the best way to pour your bubbly?
Credit: The American Chemical Society
This week, Reactions gives you plenty of champagne facts and tips to impress your fellow partygoers as you ring in the New Year.
Researchers at the Integrative Prehistory and Archaeological Science center (IPAS) at the University of Basel examined samples from the "Basel-Gasfabrik" Celtic settlement, at the present day site of Novartis. The settlement was inhabited around 100 B.C. and is one of the most significant Celtic sites in Central Europe. The team found the durable eggs of roundworms (Ascaris sp.), whipworms, (Trichuris sp.) and liver flukes (Fasciola sp.). The eggs of these intestinal parasites were discovered in the backfill of 2000 year-old storage and cellar pits from the Iron Age.
Coral bleaching, which often results in the mass mortality of corals and in the collapse of coral reef ecosystems, has become an important issue around the world, with the number of coral reefs decreasing annually, according to associate Professor Kazuhiko Koike and Ms. Lisa Fujise of Hiroshima University and collaborators. They have proposed mechanisms that might cause coral bleaching and damage.
Scientists report they they have 'turned back the clock on human cells' and created primordial germ cells - the embryonic cells that give rise to sperm and ova - in the lab, the first time that human cells have been programmed into this early developmental stage.
The results published in Cell could help provide answers as to the causes of fertility problems.
About one tenth of the world's ants are close relatives; they all belong to just one genus out of 323, called Pheidole. "If you go into any tropical forest and take a stroll, you will step on one of these ants," says Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University's Professor Evan Economo. Pheidole fill niches in ecosystems ranging from rainforests to deserts.
A mouse study finds that a high-fat diet and obesity during pregnancy compromise the blood-forming, or hematopoietic, stem cell system in the fetal liver responsible for creating and sustaining lifelong blood and immune system function.
The life-long burden of a western-style diet on the heart and circulatory system have long been appreciated. However, prior to this study, no one had considered whether the developing blood stem cells might be similarly vulnerable to prenatal high-fat diet and/or maternal obesity. The findings are published in the journal Molecular Metabolism.
An invasive ant species that has become increasingly abundant in eastern North America not only takes over yards and delivers a nasty sting, it's helping the spread of an invasive plant species. The ants are very effective dispersers of invasive plant seeds and new research suggests that together they could wreak havoc on native ecosystems.
University of Toronto researchers have found that the European fire ant, Myrmica rubra, disperses seeds of both native and invasive plants, but it does a much better job of helping an invasive plant to spread.
There is a belief that human echolocation operates as a viable "sense," working in tandem with other senses to deliver information to people with visual impairment, and a new paper finds proof for the vision-like qualities of echolocation in blind echolocators wrongly judging how heavy objects of different sizes felt.
Electrons may be regarded as small magnets that also carry a negative electrical charge. On a fundamental level, these two properties are indivisible, but in certain materials where the electrons are constrained in a quasi one-dimensional world, they appear to split into a magnet and an electrical charge, which can move freely and independently of each other.
A longstanding question has been whether or not similar phenomenon can happen in more than one dimension. A team has uncovered new evidence showing that this can happen in quasi two-dimensional magnetic materials.
Results of an early-stage clinical trial of two experimental vaccines against Ebola and Marburg viruses, the first to be completed in an African country, showed that they were safe and induced immune responses in healthy Ugandan adult volunteers.
Retail sales increase by nearly 50 per cent when shops are upgraded, according to a new marketing analysis.
Researchers from Monash University's Department of Marketing looked at the effect on both first-time visitors and existing customers when retailers undertake major remodeling of their premises.
Professor Tracey Danaher said stores were remodeled every seven to 10 years on average. As shopping is an important part of daily life for many people, the financial return on investment had the potential to be substantial.
An increase in human-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could initiate a chain reaction between plants and microorganisms that would unsettle one of the largest carbon reservoirs on the planet -- soil.
Sometimes new insect species are discovered in the wild but a lot of times they are discovered in the drawers of old museum collections.
And sometimes they are discovered by accident, which is how Dr. J. E. McPherson, professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University, discovered a new species of assassin bug.
Stable, frozen ground has long been recognized a logger's friend, capable of supporting equipment and trucks in marshy or soggy forests. Now, a comprehensive look at weather from 1948 onward shows that the logger's friend is melting.
Researchers have identified for the first time mutations that destabilize a DNA structure that turns a gene off. These mutations occur at four specific sites in what is known as the "hTERT promoter" in more than 75 percent of glioblastomas and melanomas.