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This is the Great Bear, which has led our eyes to the North Star for centuries.

Sidney Hall was an engraver best remembered for maps and atlases of our world here. But it’s hard to get a sense of “here” without looking up from time to time. Ursa Major was part of Urania’s Mirror, a [...]

Science Daily has new research that shows people sense salt differently. Genes play a role in what healthy food tastes like to supertasters:

The research involved 87 carefully screened participants who sampled salty foods such as broth, chips and pretzels, on multiple occasions, spread out over weeks. Test subjects were 45 men and 42 women, reportedly healthy, ranging in [...]

LiveScience examines the way dogs save human lives – by sniffing out prostate cancer:

Doctors at Paris’s Hospital Tenon trained the [Belgian Malinois] dogs to distinguish between the smell of urine from men with prostate cancer and those without it. At the end of the training and study the dogs correctly identified 63 out of 66 samples.

…

Canine sense [...]

The bloggers at ufunk.net have appealed to my prurient side with the Eizo Pin-up Calendar:

Miss June, 2010.

Yes, it’s a calendar that really shows it all. Eizo is a German medical imaging company. The calendar is the brainchild of their advertisers, Butter.

Read more here.

BBC News reports on the long-awaited return of the first probe to make it out to an asteroid and back:

The Hayabusa pod was picked up by a helicopter team and transferred to a control centre on the Woomera Prohibited Area.

The canister, which is believed to hold the first samples ever grabbed from the surface of an asteroid, will [...]

PhysOrg produces scientific proof that superstitions kinda do bring luck:

Damisch teamed with colleagues Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler, also from the University of Cologne, to design four experiments to test the effectiveness of good-luck superstitions….

The results of all four experiments showed the superstition did improve performance. In the golf task those with the “lucky ball” performed significantly better [...]

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In [...]

CNN throws some science at the ongoing ruckus over same-sex parenting:

A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers.

The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children’s well-being through a series of questionnaires [...]

Forbes traces the development of devices powered by body heat:

A resting male can put out between 100 and 120 watts of energy, in theory enough to power many of the electronics you use, such as your Nintendo Wii (14 watts), your cellphone (about 1 watt) and your laptop (45 watts). Eighty percent of body power is given [...]