Month: January 2022

Enlarge / Actor J.G. Hertzler, dressed as his character Martok from the Star Trek television franchise speaks during the “STLV19 Klingon Kick-Off” panel at the 18th annual Official Star Trek Convention at the Rio Hotel & Casino on July 31, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Gabe Ginsburg | Getty Images)

Most languages develop through centuries of use among groups of people. But some have a different origin: They are invented, from scratch, from one individual’s mind. Familiar examples include the international language Esperanto, the Klingon language from Star Trek and the Elvish tongues from The Lord of the Rings.

The activity isn’t new—the earliest recorded invented language was by medieval nun Hildegard von Bingen—but the Internet now allows much wider sharing of such languages among the small communities of people who speak and create them.

Christine Schreyer, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna, Canada, has studied invented languages and the people who speak them, a topic she writes about in the 2021 Annual Review of Anthropology. But Schreyer brings another skill to the table: She’s a language creator herself and has invented several languages for the movie industry: the Kryptonian language for Man of Steel, Eltarian for Power Rangers, Beama (Cro-Magnon) for Alpha, and Atlantean for Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

Enlarge / The physics behind champagne’s bubbly delights is surprisingly complex—including the source of its distinctive crackling sound. (credit: Jon Bucklel/EMPICS/PA/Getty Images)

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Researchers have uncovered the specific physical mechanism that links champagne’s distinctive crackle with the bursting of its tiny bubbles.

There’s nothing quite like the distinctive crackling and fizzing sound of a glass of freshly served champagne. It’s well established that the bursting of the bubbles produces that sound, but the specific physical mechanism isn’t quite clear. So physicists from Sorbonne University in Paris, France, decided to investigate the link between the fluid dynamics of the bursting bubbles and the crackly fizzy sounds. They described their work in a paper published back in January in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

As we’ve reported previously, the first mention of a sparkling wine dates back to 1535 in the Languedoc region of France. The classic brand Dom Perignon gets its name from a 17^th-century monk who had the job of getting rid of the bubbles that developed in his abbey’s bottled wine, lest the pressure build up so much they exploded. Legend has it that upon sipping such a bubbly wine, the monk realized the bubbles might not be such a bad thing after all, declaring, “Come quickly, brothers, I am drinking stars!”