(NASA/Space.com)

Would you care to select something from our small plate menu, sir?

• It’s not often I can step out of my house, walk 5 minutes, and see a rocket taking off. But that’s what happened Tuesday night, when NASA launched a Minotaur 1 rocket along a flight path visible to much of the East Coast. That rocket was carrying 29 satellites — a record number — into orbit, including one built by high school students. (From where I was standing near a playground in Boston, the rocket looked like a fast-moving fiery dot.)
• Interested in comets? Then check out these 12 fun facts about Comet ISON, which some people are calling the comet of the century. Like how when it round the sun, it will be moving at a speed 2500 times faster than a commercial airliner.
• The planet-hunting Kepler satellite may not be as dead as feared. Let the search for Earth 2 continue!
• We all get infected with the human papillomavirus — HPV, a well known cause of cervical and some genital cancers — at some point in our lives. But now it appears to be causing an increasing number of throat cancers, too.
• Oxaliplatin and cyclophosphamide are two powerful drugs for fighting a range of cancers. But without some help from the bacteria in you gut, they don’t do very much.
• Applying scientific results from other animals like mice to humans is always tricky business; for instance, many cancer drugs that work in mice fail miserably when tried in people. One possible factor in the problem: mice in research facilities may just be too cold.
• Men, you know we have a chromosome all to ourselves, the Y chromosome. And while we need the whole manly chromosome to be the manly men we are, it takes only two genes on it to make our manly sperm.
• New genetic studies of samples from a 20,000 year old Siberian skeleton suggest that Native Americans may have been the first Europeans to travel to the Western Hemisphere. Wait, what?
• Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans liked to get it on, according to a new analysis of ancient genomes. But that same analysis turned up something unexpected: there may be yet another species of ancient human out there that we haven’t yet discovered.
• The pharaohs mummified themselves, their families, even their pets. And now we’re finding they even mummified meat to take along during the journey to the afterlife. (5,000 year old beef jerky? I’ll pass.)
• You already know your nose has nothing on your dog’s when it comes to pure smelling power. But now we have an estimate of just how much more sensitive the canine schnoz is than the human: roughly 10,000 to 100,000 times more.

(kennykunie/Flickr)