Wildlife experts have found that perfumes made for humans can attract wild animals. Zoos use this knowledge to encourage big cats to explore their habitats. Researchers use perfume to "bait" camera traps, so they can photograph and identify a variety of species. The most successful scent found so far is Obsession For Men. Calvin Klein must be proud! Link -via Everlasting Blort

Dogs have contributed to our scientific knowledge in many ways, from the dog who sniffs out cancer to the Soviet space dog to prehistoric canine fossils. Pictured is Snuppy, the first ever cloned dog, beside his older, genetically identical progenitor.

The scientific breakthrough, led by biomedical scientist Woo Suk Hwang (who was later dismissed from the university for fabricating data on cloning human stem cells), was as laborious as Snuppy was adorable. Snuppy the puppy marked the single success out of 123 attempts spanning three years. Since then the gangly puppy has sired nine puppies of his own with two cloned females, marking the first successful breeding between clones.

Read about the other nine top science dogs in this slide show at Scientific American. Link -via Digg

Quick! How many stars are on this flag? No, it's not the American flag we use now, but a pattern with 51 stars, which will be needed if Puerto Rico becomes a state. Mathematician Skip Garibaldi worked out the most geometric layouts that will accommodate more stars if the flag has to be updated if and when states join the union. Slate posted an interactive flag calculator, in which you can enter a number of states, from one to a hundred stars, and see the best pattern according to a computer program Garibaldi created. Some numbers have more than one pattern, with up to six styles. Read all about it in this article from Chris Wilson at Slate. Link

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What's this for? I don't know! Ain't it cool, though? Still, it might be better with some music. -via Gorilla Mask

In 1970, during the Luna 17 mission, the Soviet space program landed the first ever remote-controlled vehicle on the moon. Lunokhod 1 spent eleven months taking pictures of the moon's surface, and sent back about 20,000 images. It stopped communicating with the earth in 1971. Fast-forward 40 years, and read about how a new use has been found for Lunokhod 1 at the blog Starts With A Bang! Link

Think of them as edible rhinestones, or maybe lollipops without sticks. Chica and Jo not only have the recipe and step-by-step illustrated instructions for making hard candy jewels, but also warnings about what could go wrong and why. The results are lovely bright colored hard candies folks won't believe you made yourself! Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

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Oxygen tries to make friends with other elements, with varying results. This animation was Christopher Hendryx's senior project a year ago at the Ringling College of Art + Design. -via Metafilter

Yang Liwei became China's first astronaut when he orbited the earth in 2003. Cameras were rolling as Yang emerged smiling from the space capsule after his landing. It appeared to be a perfect mission. But was it?

In a lecture he gave to a group of journalism students last month, a top official at Xinhua, the state news agency, said that the mission was not so picture-perfect. The official, Xia Lin, described how a design flaw had exposed the astronaut to excessive G-force pressure during re-entry, splitting his lip and drenching his face in blood. Startled but undaunted by Mr. Yang’s appearance, the workers quickly mopped up the blood, strapped him back in his seat and shut the door. Then, with the cameras rolling, the cabin door swung open again, revealing an unblemished moment of triumph for all the world to see.

Xia's account of the space mission agrees with astronaut Yang's story in his new autobiography of how he suffered injuries during the flight. Xia's lecture, which covered other news stories and how they were altered for the public, was posted on many Chinese websites and quickly deleted by authorities. Link -via Fark

On Google search today, if you enter "world cup", the logo at the bottom of the page is quite different. Link -via The Daily What

Video game company logos, as logos for any company, evolve and update if they are lucky enough to survive enough years. Geekosystem has a look at how they've changed. Most of these logos look much better now.

Apparently, EA’s old logo confused people.Wikipedia: “Many customers mistook the square/circle/triangle logo for a stylized “EOA.” Though they thought the “E” stood for “Electronic” and “A” for “Arts”, they had no idea what the “O” could stand for, except perhaps the o in “Electronic.” An early newsletter of EA, Farther, even jokingly discussed the topic in one issue, claiming that the square and triangle indeed stood for “E” and “A”, but that the circle was merely “a Nerf ball that got stuck in a floppy drive and has been popping up on our splash screens ever since.” It’s still enough to induce waves of nostalgia in anyone who’s played Starflight.

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It's one thing to play music on a modern gadget -many people can tap out "Happy Birthday" on a cell phone. It's quite another to perform classical pieces! Believe it or not, this person is playing "Rondo Alla Turka" {audio file} from Mozart's Piano Sonota #11 on four telephones. http://www.butternutjelly.com/home/2010/6/7/phone-piano.html

Over the last couple hundred years, many men made a living demonstrating feats of strength, by wrestling, weightlifting, or other stunts such as pulling trains. Ask Men has a list of the ten most memorable, including The Great Antonio.

The adjective “great” is an understatement for Antonio’s stature and personality. Weighting 465 pounds and standing 6-foot-4, his suits were size 90, his shoes size 28 and he often ate 25 chickens or 10 steaks at one sitting. In 1952, the Guinness Book of World Records recognized him for pulling a 433-ton train for 19.8 meters. Guinness also mentioned him again in a later edition for his feat of pulling four city buses loaded with passengers. A noted eccentric, he offered to pull a Boeing 747 down the tarmac provided Boeing gave him a jet for his own personal use, and he approached Don King saying that he would do a fight film for $1 million.

Link - via Gorilla Mask

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April Pignataro and Michael Curry of New York City got married yesterday. The bride wore a white wetsuit and the groom wore a traditional black wetsuit as they climbed inside a 120,000 gallon shark tank to take their vows at Atlantis Marine World in Riverhead, N.Y. Both are experienced divers, and said their "I dos" over a radio transmitter with an officiant who did not get in the tank.

"My mom was against it," Pignataro said. "She was concerned that my makeup and hair were going to get messed up in the water. But . . . I'm a tomboy. Hair and makeup don't mean a whole lot to me."

Link -via The Huffington Post

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When humans explore other planets, there's a possibility we may overlook something important. This animation was produced by Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham. -via Laughing Squid

The original book Chicken Soup for the Soul is 17 years old. There have been sequels published about every topic imaginable -or maybe not. In today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you'll be given a Chicken Soup title, and you decide whether it's a real book or an imaginary title. How simple can that be? Not that simple; I scored only 60%. Link