Droplets of condensation may make a cold can of beer look more appealing on a hot day, but they're also making that frosty brew warm up faster. So here's some news you can use: If it's hot and humid, put a cover over your can of cold beverage. And if you want to warm up a frozen can quickly, don't bake it. Steam it.

That's exactly what University of Washington researchers did in a series of experiments to show how the warming power of condensation applies to issues ranging from colder beer to hotter climates.

The beer-can study, published in the April issue of Physics Today, began a couple of years ago when UW atmospheric scientist Dale Durran was looking for a way to explain how condensation produced heat as the flip side of evaporative cooling. The cooling effect is well-known — we feel it when sweat evaporates to cool us off in the summer time, or when we turn on a mist cooler. But the flip side of the effect is less widely understood.

Durran figured out that the condensation on a cold aluminum can might serve as a handy illustration. He did a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation, and found that the heat released by water just 100 microns (four thousandths of an inch) thick should heat its contents by 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).

"I was surprised to think that such a tiny film of water would cause that much warming," Durran said in a UW news release.

He recruited a fellow atmospheric scientist at UW, Dargan Frierson, to conduct the initial experiment ... in Frierson's basement bathroom. First, they set a can of beverage on the toilet tank and warmed it up with a space heater. Then they took another can, turned on the shower and let the bathroom get nice and steamy. Each time they ran the experiment, the researchers stuck a thermometer through the can's pop-top opening and watched the temperature rise over the course of 15 minutes.

Mariusz Kaldon

Droplets of condensation on a chilly can are a signal that the temperature inside is rising.

Frierson said conditions got a little sticky in the steamed-up bathroom. "I think that's the most uncomfortable my research has ever made me — but it's all for science," he told NBC News.

Even though the air temperature was the same in both cases, the liquid in the steamed-up can warmed up twice as fast. The researchers followed up on the basement-bathroom findings with more rigorous lab experiments. Every time, the cans warmed up more quickly in more humid conditions.

The researchers even charted how quickly 12-ounce aluminum cans of chilled liquid should warm up, depending on different levels of temperature and humidity. For example, in five minutes, the can should get 6 degrees F (3 degrees C) warmer due to condensation amid New Orleans' typical summer conditions. The equivalent warm-up factor would be 3.5 degrees F (2 degrees C) in New York, and 2 degrees F (1 degree C) in Seattle. But in Dhahran, a Saudi city that ranks among the hottest, stickiest places in the world, the can would get about 14 degrees F (8 degrees C) warmer in five minutes.

That's why covering a cold can is a such a good idea on a steamy-hot summer day. "Probably the most important thing a beer koozie does is not simply insulate the can, but keep condensation from forming on the outside of it," Durran said.

The effects of condensation and evaporation are well-known to climatologists, but Durran and Frierson say the beer-can experiments can give the general public a better understanding of atmospheric dynamics.

"Condensation as a heat source is just tremendously important," Frierson said. "It's really like the gasoline that powers hurricanes, thunderstorms and tornadoes."

Some climate models suggest that there could be 25 percent more humidity in the atmosphere by the end of the 21st century, and that could lead to more bouts of extreme weather in the decades to come.

"We want people to appreciate how powerful this effect is," Durran told NBC News. "A very thin film around the can makes a big difference in the temperature of its contents, and that just makes you appreciate the importance of that same heating effect in our atmosphere."

Here's how to run the experiment described in the YouTube video from University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences Outreach:

1. Freeze two cans of your favorite beverage. This should take roughly seven hours, depending on your freezer.
2. Fifteen minutes before taking out the cans, preheat oven to 250 degrees F and start boiling water in a pot. Place a cookie rack on top of pot.
3. Take the cans out of freezer. Place one in the preheated oven. and one over the boiling pot. 
4. Start timer for 10 minutes. 
5. After 10 minutes, carefully remove cans from oven and pot.
6. Crack open both cans and pour into separate glasses.
7. Take a photo/video of the two cans and glasses, go to the UW YouTube page, and post a video response.

More beer-can science:

• Tiny sip of beer can produce burst of pleasure
• Study explains the science of a beer buzz
• Scientists study how beer goes bad

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET April 26: Would wiping off the drops of condensation keep your drink cooler? Sorry, says UW spokeswoman Hannah Hickey. "That will only make your drink even warmer," she writes in a Twitter update.

Update for 2:25 p.m. ET April 27: Some commenters are wondering why there's so much fuss over a relatively simple concept. The point of the exercise wasn't really to break new ground in atmospheric physics (or in summertime beverage consumption), but "to improve our intuition about the power of condensational heating" — which is a huge factor in climate dynamics. Durran explained further in a comment below, and I'm providing an extended version of his comments here to give them a little more visibility:

"In my class, students definitely need to know how condensation causes heating. Here's how. There are bonds that link water molecules together into a crystal lattice to form ice. It takes heat (energy) to break a few of those bonds and turn ice to liquid water. To evaporate the liquid water, the rest of the bonds between molecules need to be broken, which takes a lot more heat. Once all the bonds are broken, the liquid is converted to water vapor, an invisible gas.

"This processes reverses when water vapor is cooled enough to condense as liquid water. Bonds between molecules re-form, and the heat it took to originally break them is released into the surroundings.

"The reason we make a big deal about the power of condensational heating is that it does amazing things in the atmosphere, such as powering the updrafts in thunderstorms. The rising cloud-filled updrafts in the video linked below ascend like hot-air balloons because they are warmed, not by burning a fuel like propane, but by the heat released as water vapor condenses.

"Here's the video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVIwDoogncQ

"Such a visualization might help people understand some of the applications. (Only the last half of the Physics Today article was about the beer can heating.)"

Durran and Frierson are the authors of "Condensation, Atmospheric Motion, and Cold Beer" in Physics Today. Supplemental experiments are described in "An Experiment Uses Cold Beverages to Demonstrate the Warming Power of Latent Heat." Lab experiments were performed by Stella Choi and Steven Brey. Galen Richards and Jaycyl Golding, high school students serving as Pacific Science Center Discovery Corps interns, worked on earlier versions of the experiments. Instrument makers Allen Hart and Steven Domonkos built experimental apparatuses. Funding was provided by National Science Foundation grants AGS-0846641 and AGS-1138977.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL / Cornell

When some people look at this nine-year-old picture from NASA's Spirit rover, they see a graphic depiction of manhood. Actually, it's standard operating procedure for making a turn on Mars.

Some Mars maniacs just won't grow up: A picture of the track patterns left behind by the Mars rovers' standard turning maneuver has drawn giggles and gasps — merely because it looks like a penis scrawled on the Red Planet.

"The rude drawing has emerged in a series of images taken by one of its rover machines. ... The latest pictures beamed back from one of the rovers show signs that the project's controllers have started to get a bit bored," The Sun, a British tabloid, reported on Wednesday.

Even Sarcastic Rover, one of Twitter's top parody personas, got into the act: "Since everyone's asking, let me just say that some other robot did this ... definitely not me," it tweeted.

The jibes from Sarcastic Rover and The Sun, and tons more like them, were sparked by a Reddit forum's discovery of the picture the day before. But this picture isn't the product of a bored (or filthy-minded) rover driver, and it wasn't beamed down recently. It's part of a classic nine-year-old panorama from NASA's Spirit rover, looking back toward its landing platform. (You can actually see the platform in the high-resolution version of the panorama.)

This type of rover wheel-track pattern, which could euphemistically be called "a bat and two balls," has been left on Mars many times, not only by Spirit (which gave up the ghost in 2010 or so), but also by Opportunity (which is still going strong more than nine years after landing on Mars) and Curiosity (which landed last year).

All those rovers have six wheels, three on each side, and they leave behind two parallel tracks when they're traveling in a straight line. When the rover has to make a turn, the wheels rotate in place to put the robot in the desired direction for the next leg of its trek. If the turn is significant enough, you get a nice set of circles at the end of a pair of parallel tracks.

Got it? Now we can move on — for instance, to lewd pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA / ESA / STScI / AURA / La Plata Obs.

A sub-cloud of dust in the Carina Nebula displays what some have called "the cosmic finger of friendship."

More tracks from the Red Planet:

• That's one small step ... on Mars?
• Curiosity leaves tracks in Morse code
• 3-D adds depth to tracks on Mars

Tip o' the Log to Jia-Rui Cook at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for finding the original Spirit panorama from Mars.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA file

Apollo 10 astronauts Gene Cernan and Tom Stafford go through procedures during a pre-launch simulation. One procedure in particular created a bit of trouble during the mission in May 1969.

Bathroom rituals in outer space are a perennial favorite, particularly when they go wrong — as evidenced by the latest wave of hilarity over the runaway poop that prompted rude remarks during the Apollo 10 round-the-moon mission in 1969.

A 500-page-plus transcript of the declassified mission log records tons of routine conversations among the mission's three astronauts: commander Tom Stafford, lunar module pilot Gene Cernan and command module pilot John Young. But six days into the eight-day mission, around page 414, an emergency pops up:

"Give me a napkin, quick," Stafford says. "There's a turd floating through the air."

"I didn't do it," Young says. "It ain't one of mine."

"I don't think it's one of mine," Cernan says.

"Mine was a little more sticky than that," Stafford replies. "Throw that away."

The astronauts discuss the finer points of waste disposal in space, and then move on to other business. But minutes later, it's "Houston, we have a problem" all over again.

"Here's another goddam turd," Cernan says. "What's the matter with you guys?"

The Apollo astronauts had a rudimentary system for disposing of solid waste — basically, by doing their business in a bag, sealing up the bag, kneading it to mix in disinfectant, and then putting the whole thing in a waste receptacle. The process required "a great deal of skill," a post-Apollo NASA review reported. Obviously, some steps must have been missed on occasion.

"In general, the Apollo waste management system worked satisfactorily from an engineering standpoint," according to the biomedical review. "From the point of view of crew acceptance, however, the system must be given poor marks."

The International Space Station provides more commodious commodes, with suction systems that help astronauts deal with zero-G toiletry. There are still usability challenges, however, as space passenger Richard Garriott explained in this 2010 video.

Some reports have suggested that the transcript describing Apollo 10's "Close Encounters of the Turd Kind" was released just recently, but it's actually been declassified for decades. The 44-year-old conversation sparked a new round of giggles over the past week, due to its renewed exposure on The Straight Dope, Laughing Squid, Reddit and elsewhere. You'll find lots more rude talk in the Apollo 10 transcript if you look hard enough — and if you need a little help, Distractions in Space stands ready to lend a hand. So to speak.

More rude space subjects:

• How to use a space toilet
• How not to be a space slob
• Sex in space will be complicated

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Kickstarter

Supporters of the Kickstarter campaign to build a fleet of X-wing fighters raised $721,036, while a competing campaign to design a Death Star battle station raised 328,613 British pounds, or just under $500,000. None of the supporters had to pay up, however, because the campaigns finished up far short of their funding goals.

Sorry, "Star Wars" fans: A real-life Death Star and the X-wing fighters to bring it down won't be built anytime soon. First the White House snubbed a petition calling on the government to build the Death Star. Now two Kickstarter projects aimed at building a fully operational battle station as well as an X-wing fleet have fallen far short of their multimillion-dollar funding goals.

That means nobody is out any money, which probably comes as a huge relief to those who pledged their backing to the joke projects.

Both the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance have something to brag about: The Death Star project, associated with Nick Petkovich's Gnut.co.uk in Britain, won pledges from 2,388 backers amounting to £328,613, or just under a half-million dollars. The X-wing fund-raiser, created by Simon Kwan in Shanghai, had fewer backers but raised more money — $721,036, to be exact.

"While we didn't meet meet our funding goal, we soundly beat the amount raised by the Empire for their Death Star!" Kwan wrote. "Take THAT, Dark Side ;-P"

The final tallies when the campaigns concluded on April Fools' Day would send most Kickstarter project creators over the moon, but the way Kickstarter's fund-raising system works, the creators can't cash in on those pledges unless the project goal is met. The goals were set high on purpose — about $30 million for the Death Star, and $11 million for the X-wing fighter fleet — so that backers could get in on the joke while staying off the hook for the money.

Even if they raised $30 million, that sum wouldn't even be enough to buy just the protective covers for a real-life Death Star's thermal exhaust ports, or a single sub-light propulsion thrust engine for an X-wing fighter. In the real world, the cost of building the comparatively puny, 450-ton International Space Station has been estimated at upwards of $100 billion. The estimated development cost for NASA's next-generation launch system is in the neighborhood of $35 billion. And for that price, you don't even get laser cannons.

A while back, college students calculated that it'd cost $852 quadrillion just to buy the steel for an armed and fully operational Death Star. Transterrestrial Musings' Rand Simberg says that estimate is grossly inflated — but in any case, Darth Vader would find the lack of Kickstarter funds disturbing.

More about futuristic spaceships:

• Starship Enterprise petition fizzles
• Realities almost keep pace with sci-fi
• Petition puts nuclear rocket in spotlight 

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

MSNBC TV

The classic rock-paper-scissors game encourages a strategy of second-guessing. In this particular showdown, "rock" (the closed fist) beats "scissors" (the forked fingers). "Paper" is represented by an open palm.

When people try to second-guess a rival, they don't eighth-guess or ninth-guess them: Using a glorified version of the classic rock-paper-scissors game, researchers have found that players tend to converge on a strategy of thinking around two steps ahead.

They say their findings could shed light on other pursuits where rivals have to engage in cycles of second-guessing — including fashion trends, political campaigns and the financial markets.

"Anticipation may be the motor that keeps fads running in cycles," Seth Frey, a doctoral candidate studying psychology and brain science at Indiana University, said in a news release. "It could be a source of the violent swings that we see in financial markets. Anyone in a bidding war on eBay may have been caught in this dynamic. If the bidders are tweaking their increasing bids based on the tweaks of others, then the whole group may converge in price and determine how those prices rise. The process isn't governed by the intrinsic value of that mint-condition Star Wars lunch box, but on the collective dynamics of people trying to reason through each other's thoughts."

Frey and Robert Goldstone, who directs the Percepts and Concepts Laboratory at Indiana University, designed a laboratory experiment designed to find out how strategies changed over repeated cycles. They decided against the relatively limited repertoire of rock-paper-scissors — the hand-flashing game in which scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, and rock dulls scissors. Instead, they used a guessing game in which players guess a number between 1 and 24. A player wins a point when he or she guesses a number exactly one step higher than another competitor. There's one exception: 1 beats 24.

During 22 sessions at the university, 123 psychology students participated in the "Mod Game," in small groups. Each point that was won in the game earned a player 10 cents.

The results were published online by the journal PLOS ONE on Monday. Players could have simply guessed random numbers during each round, but that's not what happened. Over the course of repeated guessing games, the players tended to fall into the pattern of raising their guesses in a cluster that cycled through all the choices. The behavior suggested that players tried to guess what their rivals were guessing about their guess. In a video, Frey compared the pattern to a famous poisoning scene in the movie "The Princess Bride."

As the guessing games continued, the speed of the cycling accelerated. After 200 rounds, the rate of cycling gradually reached an average of 2.35 "thinking steps," Frey and Goldstone reported. They suggested that a synchronicity in the guessing was beneficial for the group as a whole, because the players earned no payoff if they thought too far ahead.

"At a core level, people's guesses do converge, and that's interesting because dominant models suggest otherwise," Goldstone said in the news release. "Even though people are trying to beat each other out, they end up in synchronicity."

More about the science of rock-paper-scissors:

• Rock-paper-scissors robot will beat you every time
• Science reveals how to win at rock-paper-scissors
• Judge orders rock-paper-scissors to decide dispute

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.