The oyster is a bivalve. A bivalve is a mollusk with a hinged shell. If an oyster were not a bivalve, he'd just be a stupid conch and hardly worth our attention. Another word for "bivalve" is "pelecypoda" but it never caught on (personally, I think that having a synonym for "bivalve" AT ALL, is delightfully surprising).

A shell is essential to the survival of the oyster in that it helps to differentiate it from something an old sailor might have spit overboard. This confusion might not be an issue with people, but to a rutting oyster it could be extremely nasty. And, during the rutting season, an oyster's gonad can be fifty percent of his body volume, which causes most of them to have their trousers altered. Sex between oysters is more an act of violence than love.

The larval stage of the oyster is called the "prodissoconch stage," and why not? The larva has a bivalve shell and a complete digestive system; moreover, it has an organ found only in bivalve larvae called the "velum." This causes the larval oyster to have a rather inflated view of itself, despite the fact that it might well end up fried and sandwiched between two slices of bread. The larval stage lasts for 18 days to a month... after which, the party's over.

The larva becomes a juvenile during a process called "metamorphosis." The process is much like Kafka's story of the same name, but generally with fewer Czechs involved. The oyster goes from a mobile existence to a sedentary one, which resembles government employment in many ways. At this phase, the oyster must eat the food that comes to it... regardless of its quality... very much like riding coach-class in a major airline, although far less depressing.

Mortality can be very high amongst oysters, due to the fact that nearly everything kills them: Changes in temperature, pollution, agitation caused by run-off, and disease; in fact, there are more diseases that kill oysters than there are oysters to be killed by them. Many of these diseases have no cures because most of those concerned with such things concentrate their research upon genetically engineering an oyster that bleeds horseradish.

What's Portland, Oregon without that rain / What's New Years Eve without champagne? / Nada nada nada, not a damn thing. As the party people of the world recover from their collective hangovers, lets take a moment to return to a topic still bubbling throughout their minds. Although the big science news of this new year is the extra second added to the atomic clock, (can anyone say 10...10...9...8...etc,) the topic at hand is one of a more effervescent nature; Champagne.

The hallmark of this drink are the ferocious bubbles that emerge from the liquid, tickle the tongue, and also quicken the rate of intoxication. Sparkling wines gain their bubbles due to a second fermentation step, where the carbon dioxide produced as yeast turns sugar into alcohol is not allowed to escape, and thus dissolves into the liquid. It is the reemergence of this CO2 when the wine is poured into a glass that had puzzled scientists.

In order for dissolved gas to come out of solution it needs a nucleation site, a smaller pocket of gas that can serve as a jumping off point for bubble formation. Although you wouldn't guess it by the way bubbles explode out of a recently poured glass of Champagne, bubble formation is not a trivial process. According to Laplace's Law, the smaller the bubble, the higher the pressure inside of it. The CO2 dissolved within Champagne has a pressure of about 6 atm, which is enough to sustain a bubble 0.4 microns in diameter. Until recently, people thought that the nucleation sites for the bubbles in champagne were tiny imperfections in the the glass of champagne flutes. The problem with this theory is that these rough areas on the glass surface are much smaller than 0.4 microns and incapable of spurring bubble formation.

Professor Liger-Belair--who doubles as a consultant for the Champagne house Moet and Chandon--came across a solution to the bubble riddle. Even after washing a glass, it is impossible to remove all the dust particles from it. When Champagne is poured into a glass, the liquid does not completely surround the dust particles, creating pockets of air large enough to serve as nucleation sites for CO2 bubbles. After a bubble forms, it grows easily and rises to the top of the glass where it explodes, making the pleasing sparkle noise, a sound that is joy to some ears, and provokes painful flashbacks to others.