No word on what percentage of skin Lopez' sternum counts as.

We’re glad to see that scientists are applying their collective considerable brainpower to the somewhat Neanderthal-ish question of exactly how much skin a woman should show to achieve maximum attractiveness (and given that we have yet to find a cure for cancer or eradicate world hunger, I think we can all agree this is an excellent topic for scientists and sociologists to spend time on.)

If you’re wondering how these researchers managed to quantify something as legendarily baffling as human desire, read on: the researchers concluded that women are at their most attractive when they bare precisely 40% of their skin - no more and no less. How’s that calculated? you might ask. Well, each arm counts for 10%, each leg is 15%, and a midriff clocks in at a whopping 50%.

Feel free to mix and match. Might we suggest a leg, an arm, and 30% of a torso?

You may consider yourself an adventure traveler—you’ve hung out with the penguins in Antarctica, bopped from beach to beach in the wild South Pacific, hiked the jungles of southeast Asia without a guide, crossed the Kalahari on the back of a camel. Maybe you’ve even conquered that holy mother of adventure tourism and climbed Mt. Everest.

No matter how impressive your traveler’s pedigree, a brand-new, completely uncharted frontier is about to open: outer space. And you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen it.

A Spanish architecture firm claims to be in process of building the first hotel in outer space, with an anticipated opening date of 2012. A three-night stay will only run you a cool $4.4 million, including 8 weeks of training on a tropical island (how can I sign up for just that?) It will take a day and a half to arrive at the hotel and once there, guests will be outfitted with Velcro suits that will allow them to attach to the walls of their pod in zero-gravity.

Home sweet vacation home.

Unlike most resort experiences, there aren’t many activities besides drinking Tang and floating around (so treatments at the space spa are going to have to wait!) but with 15 sunrises per day and a complete orbit around Earth every 80 minutes, we have a feeling space tourists won’t spend much time bored.

So we want to know: if you could, would you head into space for the vacation of a lifetime? If not, where’s your science fiction destination of choice?

Photo by Dan Shirley

After being told how important sunscreen is for the fight against skin cancer, a new team of researches from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland is kicking off a 3-year study to determine whether or not sunscreen may actually be linked to brain disease. What?

“There is now firm evidence that some engineered nanoparticles entering intravenously or via lungs can reach the brains of small animals,” said pathologist and toxicologist Professor Vyvyan Howard, who is working on the project.

I’m not exactly sure what this means for us, but I guess we’ll have to just wait and see.