Oh, St. Patrick’s Day! Somehow it has become the day of binge drinking, day of doing shots, and the day before contemplating why you spent the last 24 hours drinking your head off. Nonetheless, St. Paddy must be honored, and honor him we shall—with alcohol and some science.

We decided to reach into the past and pull out the wondrous mystery of the Guinness beer bubbles. For years, the mysterious downward flowing Guinness bubbles have confounded both professional scientists and drinkers. When the bartender pulls a pint of most any beer, the bubbles can clearly be seen gushing to the top. When a pint of Guinness is poured, however, the bubbles slyly cascade down the sides of the glass, while the beer mysteriously maintains its frothy layer on top.

So in 2004, scientists Andy Alexander from the Royal Society of Chemistry and Dick Zare of Stanford University decided to find out why the bubbles act the way they do. After preliminary research trips to the local pub proved unfruitful, they decided to move the scene to a lab where they rigged a high-speed camera to take pictures of the Guinness being poured. The camera could zoom in and magnify the images ten times.

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The next time, you’re taking shots straight out of a bottle of mezcal, the potent Mexican alcohol made from the agave or a maguey plant, remember what you’re drinking. Swirling in your mouth is not just the strong smoky alcohol guaranteed to knock you out, but also caterpillar DNA from the “worm” that is often found at the bottom of the bottle.

The worm is actually the larval form of the moth Hypopta agavis that lives on the agave plant and really has no business being in the bottle except to serve as a marketing gimmick. Still, many a drinker has set out to prove his iron will and iron stomach by swallowing the booze-soaked insect at the bottom. Turns out there’s no need for such dramatic gestures. Researchers have found that DNA from the caterpillar can be extracted from the alcohol it’s preserved in.

Ars technica reports on the scientists findings:

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• Avast ye matey! Indian Ocean pirates arrr trouble for lily-livered climate researchers. OK jokes aside, Somali pirates are such a serious threat that the scientists studying Indian Ocean conditions need an armed escort to carry out their work.

• Nonja the Orangutan can update her own Facebook page. Apparently, she’s also a fan of the camera-phone-too-close-to-the-face profile pic.

• The Iron Curtain not only isolated Eastern Europe, it also kept alien bird species from colonizing it.

• Nepal’s cabinet met today to discuss climate change’s effect on the Himalayas—5,242 meters high at the base of Mount Everest.

• Finally, it’s Friday. Time to kick back, crack open a few space beers, and enjoy the weekend.

New Zealand explorers are Antarctica-bound to rescue a cache of rare whiskey left on the continent by British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton during his journey in 1909.

Buried under the floorboards of a hut where his crew spent a long, dark winter are two crates of an extinct brand of McKinlay and Co. whiskey. Experts say the historic booze has been preserved in ice, according to Stuff.co.az:

The New Zealanders will use special drills to free the trapped crates and rescue a bottle from the crates, discarded near the Cape Royds hut used by the Nimrod expedition, or at least draw off a sample using a syringe.

However, they won’t be sipping the whiskey if they can remove it. International protocols say the crates can be removed from Antarctica for conservation only. Whyte & Mackay, the distillery that owns McKinlay and Co., says if they can draw a sample, the blend could be replicated and put back into production. So one day soon, you too could be sipping on Shackleton’s preferred hooch.

Let’s hope their drilling adventure goes more smoothly than other recent trips to Antarctica…

Related content:
Discoblog: Antarctic Glaciers Melt and Spill Their Secret: DDT
Discoblog: Antarctica and the American Southwest: Former Neighbors?
Discoblog: Using Nuclear Tests on “Aged” Whiskey Could Save You $30,000

Image: flickr / individuo

• Forget Graceland: If you’re in Huntsville, Ala., be sure to visit the graves of spacemonkeys Able and Baker, the first monkeys to survive a space flight. You can find the graves easily—they’re strewn with bananas.

• If you’re reading this, you have a UFO to thank—at least according to a Russian scientist, who claims an alien spacecraft saved earth from an approaching meteorite by smashing into it a century ago.

• To test whether beer or a joint does more damage to driving skills, researchers got students drunk, or high on marijuana. The results? Stoned drivers drive significantly slower than drunk ones, but—surprise!—both groups drove less safely than their placebo’ed peers.

• Think you’re smart? Not compared to this 16-year-old Iraqi. It took him only four months to solve a math problem that had been baffling academics for 300 years.

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People who take their Scotch seriously—and many should, if they’re paying up to $38,000 a bottle for it—may have just made some new, unexpected friends: archaeologists. Whiskey connoisseurs will want to borrow an archaeological technique now that scientists have learned that radiocarbon dating can weed out counterfeit whiskey.

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Ohio resident Kile Wygle certainly gets points for creativity. He not only converted an old lawnmower into a motorized bar stool, but also drove it drunk, attempting to avoid the associated charges by saying he was driving a bar stool—not a vehicle. But under state law, unfortunately for him, operating any motorized vehicle except for wheelchairs and mobility scooters is prohibited while under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

So how did this particular vehicle come about? Wygle’s homemade stool was powered by a 5-horsepower motorcycle engine, which controlled a chain drive attached to a rear wheel. The front wheels were controlled by an old lawnmower steering wheel. The stool could reach up to 38 miles per hour, and at that speed, comfort is sure to be important—enter the padded seat, which had been welded to the frame.

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Most people, even without refined taste for wine, probably could taste the difference between vino from a box and a $50 chardonnay. But perhaps few of us have the palette to tell a really good wine from a really, really good wine. Well, fear not—the machines are coming to do the job for us.

Two different groups have recently announced new designs that could help consumers know whether they’re guzzling the good stuff or imbibing a fraud. First, scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory created a counterfeit-resistant cap. Roger Johnston and Jon Warner’s design fits over the cork, and once it’s attached to the wine bottle, it completes a circuit.

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Yesterday we wrote about scientists who were trying to learn the secrets of efficient traffic flows by watching the masters—ants. Now, researchers are trying to figure out the traffic flows of a much less organized group—drunks.

Simon Moore from the University of Cardiff in the U.K. wanted to find the math behind the stumbling and weaving of a drunkard’s gait. So he and his team spent nights in the center of the Welsh capital, studying how people in varying states of inebriation stagger around. They then created a moving model from their data, which you can watch here.

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The next time you think about making that cocktail a double, wait—it might already be one.

William Kerr, along with colleagues from the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute, took a scientific bar crawl—no, not the kind where you visit science-themed drinking establishments. The researchers visited 80 places in northern California, mostly bars and restaurants, to find out the alcohol content of their drinks—by analyzing them, not by partaking. Compared to the scientific standard of one drink—12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or one and a half ounces of 80-proof liquor—the bars and restaurants were pretty generous with their liquor, giving out stronger booze than the researchers expected, and more of it.

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