Update
The official balloting is over. The unofficial results — the winners are Vulcan and Cerberus. For all the results check out plutorocks.com. Thanks for voting!
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P4 and P5? Surely you can come up with better names for Pluto’s newly-discovered moons. Astronomers at the SETI Institute are asking for your help. You can cast your ballot at plutorocks.com until noon EST (1700 GMT) on February 25th.

Traditionally, the names of Pluto’s moons come from Greek and Roman mythology and are related to stories about Hades and the Underworld.  (Pluto moons that were discovered earlier bear the names Charon, Hydra and Nix.)   But if Orpheus, Persephone or Vulcan don’t float your boat, you can offer up your own suggestion by filling out a write-in ballot.

For all the latest science news, check out the National Geographic’s twice-weekly news rundown, EarthCurrent .

What’s the trick to making a truly satisfying hot chocolate?  It may be less about the ingredients you use and more about which mug you use to drink it.  Researchers at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Oxford conducted a study, asking people to try out several cups of hot chocolate and then rank them based on taste.  Unbeknownst to the participants, all the hot chocolate was the same but when the responses were tallied, there was a clear favorite.  A majority of the taste-testers declared that the hot chocolate in the orange mug had the most flavor.

This isn’t just a random trick.  How people perceive the taste of food is influenced by many elements, including appearance or the price paid to acquire it.  (Anyone notice how that expensive bottle of wine just tastes better?)  “The colour of the container where food and drink are served can enhance some attributes like taste and aroma” said Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, one of the study’s authors.

There’s no word yet on what color plate you should use to serve your chocolate-chip cookies.

The study was published in the Journal of Sensory Studies.

For all the latest science news, check out our twice-weekly news rundown, Earth Current.

Photo by Allison Clements.

I was surprised to recently spot gnatcatchers in my neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia.  These birds are not a typical sight in urban areas, but this is just one example of the unusual guests East Coast residents have been seeing at their feeders during the last two weeks, thanks to Sandy.  The hurricane disrupted migration routes for some birds, and others simply got blown off course by the violent winds.  The winter storm, coming from the north, and Hurricane Sandy, coming from the south, brought together a very peculiar group of birds.

Ebird.org offered a nice description of the avian mishmash: “Pelagic birds were inland, overland migrant waterfowl were grounded, Arctic birds were south, western birds made it east, and some European birds even crossed the ocean.”

With all this going on, the website reports, it’s shaping up to be a “historic month” for bird movements, with possibly more species east of the Mississippi than at any other time.

For all the latest science news, check out National Geographic Library’s twice-weekly news rundown, EarthCurrent.

Spruce trees covered in volcanic ash after the 1912 eruption; photo by George C. Martin

Residents on Alaska’s Kodiak Island were haunted last week — not by Halloween ghosts, but by the remnants of a long-ago volcanic eruption.   Ash dating back to the 1912 eruption of Novarupta was stirred up by strong winds and dry conditions along the Alaskan coast. The ash rose as high as 4,000 feet and prompted aviation warnings. People said it looked like smog.

The eruption of Novarupta was one of the largest in the modern history — 10 times more powerful than Mt.St. Helens. The original ash spewed up to 100,000 feet in the air.  It covered the floor of Alaska’s Katmai Valley to a record 700 feet and drifted as far as Northern Africa.

All that debris takes a long time to disappear, and Dave Schneider, of the Alaska Volcano Observatory, said it’s no surprise that Alaskans are still seeing the after-effects.  The geophysicist says they’ll be seeing ash for “many, many more years.”

For all the latest science news, check out our twice-weekly news rundown, Earth Current.

The image was captured from inside a 12th-floor office at the National Science Foundation headquarters.

Oh, to be counted among the nimbus and the stratus! That’s what the fans of the undulatus aspertus want.  The undulatus cloud, which resembles agitated waves, was first discovered in 1951 but has not yet been recognized as an official cloud type.   The undulatus drew attention in 2009 when a dramatic photo of one taken in Cedar Falls, Iowa went viral.  (The picture was featured on the National Geographic’s website.)   That same year the Cloud Appreciation Society took up the cause to give the turbulent cloud its very own classification. The final say is up to the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization in Geneva.  The undulatus will only be officially recognized if it is included in the WMO’s International Cloud Atlas.

The Cloud Appreciation Society is even developing an iPhone app to help document and geo-tag these clouds, which will allow researchers to compile information on where and how the clouds form and to make the case for its classification. So if you are outside and see one, take a photo. Help these cloud watchers get their cloud its deserved status.

For all the latest science news, check out National Geographic Library’s twice-weekly news rundown, EarthCurrent.

Photo by Linda Mullins

Houses and buildings weren’t the only things hit hard by last month’s hurricane.  One of the Gulf Coast’s most notorious invasive species got slammed by Isaac. Almost 20,000 nutria, or copyu, were drowned and washed up on the Mississippi coast following the storm. These 20-pound rodents have wrecked ecological havoc along the coast for decades.

Crews were hard at work last week, removing the carcasses.  In Harrison County, workers removed approximately 16 tons of dead rodents.  According to one official, a number of spectators have come to the beach to see the rats, but most of them didn’t stay long — the decomposing animals can be smelled up to 3 miles away.

“Although they’re smelly and disgusting, the dead rats pose no health risk to humans,” said Brigid Elchos of the Mississippi Board of Animal Health.

For all the latest science news, check out our twice-weekly news rundown, EarthCurrent.

Photo by Nathan Deremer

Why would a bird deliberately fly into a hurricane? It seems that some migratory birds fly in so they can get a huge push coming out the other side. Researchers at the Center for Conservation Biology in Williamsburg, Virginia have been tracking migrating whimbrels. Before a storm last year, scientists attached a satellite transmitter to a bird dubbed “Hope”.  A statement from the American Bird Conservancy described what they saw:

“She took 27 hours averaging just 9 mph to fly non-stop through the storm to get to the center; then she flew at an average of almost 100 mph for 1.5 hours out the back end, using the power of the storm to ‘slingshot’ her towards land.”

For all the latest science news, check out our twice-weekly news rundown, EarthCurrent.

According to weather researcher Maximiliano Herrer, Needles sets a new world record for the hottest rain in world history. With moisture in the air registering at 11%, it also was “the lowest humidity rain has ever occurred at anywhere on Earth in recorded history.”  The previous record for warmest rain was a shower that occurred at 109°F in Mecca, Saudi Arabia on June 5th of this year.

For all the latest science news, check out our twice-weekly news rundown, Earth Current.

Photo by Donald Crump

How does one make a sand castle that is strong enough for those extra crenellations? By using the correct mix of sand and water. Researchers at the Amsterdam University found that a mixture of sand and one percent water is the ideal for making sand castles. Daniel Bonn, a physicist, believes with this mixture one can build castle up to twenty feet high.

“Here we investigated the stability of wet sand columns to account for the maximum height of sandcastles. We find that the columns become unstable to elastic buckling under their own weight. This allows to account for the maximum height of the sand column; it is found to increase as the 2/3 power of the base radius of the column.”

In other words, it’s about one teaspoon of water per pound of sand.

For all the latest science news, check out the National Geographic’s twice-weekly news rundown, EarthCurrent.

Image credit: NASA

What is the smell clinging to an astronaut after a spacewalk? Some have described it as an acrid aroma — others say it reminds them of seared steak.  After a 2003 mission, astronaut Don Pettit attempted to be a little more precise:

The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

NASA hired chemist Steven Pearce to recreate the odor here on earth.  With his help astronauts-in-training get a little taste — or sniff — of what’s to come after liftoff.

For all the latest science news, check out the National Geographic’s twice-weekly news rundown, EarthCurrent.