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In time for Valentine's Day, researchers have determined which champagne glass size will give drinkers the optimal experience. 

While anti-science politicians in Washington, D.C. block science solutions to harvesting more fish, a crucial piece of information about salmon isn't being considered; the numbers without a science solution only look good because of the massive influx of hatchery-raised fish that return to spawn in the wild. Only about ten percent of the fall-run Chinook salmon spawning in California's Mokelumne River are naturally produced wild salmon.

Recent research examined suicide rates north and south of the border between 1960 and 2008 and revealed the widening gap in suicide rates between Scotland and England and Wales is largely due to the number of young Scottish men taking their lives.The suicide rate for both men and women was lower in Scotland than the rest of the United Kingdom until around 1968 when it overtook the other two but suicide rates among men continued to rise on both sides of the border until the early 1990s when rates in England and Wales began to fall. The gap between north and south widened markedly.

The deadliest mass extinction that we know of, 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period,  took a long time to kill most of Earth's life, and it killed in stages. It wasn't superior to sudden extinctions just because it was gradual.By the end of the Permian period, Earth was almost a lifeless planet. Around 90 percent of all living species disappeared then, in what scientists have called "The Great Dying." Chemical evidence buried in rocks formed during this major extinction can tell science part of what happened.

Bacteria can multiply rapidly, potentially doubling every 20 minutes in ideal conditions but this exponential growth phase is preceded by a period known as lag phase, where no increase in cell number is seen. Lag phase was first described in the 19th Century, and was assumed to be needed by bacteria to prepare to exploit new environmental conditions - they are basically Zombies. Beyond this, surprisingly little is known about lag phase, other than bacteria are metabolically active in this period. But exactly what are bacteria doing physiologically during that time?

What is actually happening in the brain when one person looks at another? For people with prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces, information processing - the stages that our brains go through to recognize a face - is breaking down. 

It may turn out that coffee is bad for you. The World Health Organization already lists it as a possible carcinogen, despite any evidence, but they do the same thing about cell phones, in contrast to any evidence - perhaps Big Tea donates a lot to WHO.Until a group more scientifically valid than WHO finds a problem with coffee, Science 2.0 will continue to push articles extolling it - the bolder the better, like us.  Even decaffeinated coffee may be terrific. Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have discovered that decaffeinated coffee may improve brain energy metabolism associated with type 2 diabetes, a known risk factor for dementia and other neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease. 

If you've ever wondered why the man in your life can't recall your discussion of organic squash from 20 minutes ago but he can vividly recall the time 11 years ago when you insulted his "Captain Planet ad the Planeteers" figurines, there is a science answer; women let things go and men don't.Or...men have better memories.  Research undertaken by University of Montreal researchers at Louis-H Lafontaine Hospital showed a woman's memory of an experience is less likely to be accurate than a man's if it was unpleasant and emotionally provocative.

Plants help keep us cool by absorbing CO2 - sometimes too cool. The arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages, according to a research team that set out to identify the effects that the first land plants had on the climate during the Ordovician Period, which ended 444 million years ago. During this period the climate gradually cooled, leading to a series of 'ice ages'. This global cooling was caused by a dramatic reduction in atmospheric carbon, which this research now suggests was triggered by the arrival of plants.

NGC 3324, on the northern outskirts of the chaotic environment of the Carina Nebula in the constellation of Carina (The Keel, part of Jason’s ship the Argo), is about 7500 light-years from Earth and has been sculpted by many other pockets of star formation. A rich deposit of gas and dust in the NGC 3324 region fueled a burst of star birth there several millions of years ago and led to the creation of several hefty and very hot stars.

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has allowed researchers to measure neutral "alien" particles entering our solar system from interstellar space; a first look at the constituents of the interstellar medium, the matter between star systems, and how they interact with our heliosphere.

If you ask Europeans about the metric system, they declare America should get with the program because it is more popular. When it comes to speaking English, however, barely a third of the EU's 500 million citizens speak English yet that is how the business of the EU's 27 member countries is conducted.  No one is expected to speak 23 different languages.