Three may be the magic number, but seven is the one we like the most

Q. On Super Bowl Sunday, where are you most apt to spot the “Winter Football”? A. Overhead in the night sky, displaying “eight of the 20 brightest stars in the entire sky, a ring of sparkling multicolored jewels encircling the constellation Orion the Hunter,” says Dean Regas in “100 Things to See in the Night Sky.” Often called the Winter Circle or Winter Hexagon, they are visible on a normal winter evening in January and February around 8 or 9 p.m.

To trace out the Winter Football, start by locating the brightest of the stars, Sirius, the Dog Star, found at the pointy end of the football that is nearest to the ground. Next, going clockwise, you will find Procyon, the Little Dog Star, followed by the Gemini Twins’ head stars, Pollus and Castor. From there, go to bright Capella at the upper point of the football, then take a quick turn down toward the horizon where you’ll spot the Bull’s Eye star, Aldebaran, then Rigel—Orion’s left foot— and finally back to Sirius. At 65 degrees long and 40 degrees wide and covering almost half of the entire southern sky, the Winter Football encompasses the huge star pattern of the season. Q. Calling all numbers lovers. Can you say what the following numbers signify: 7, 3, 8, 4, 5, 13, 9, 6, 2, 11? And why is 7 in the first place? A. From 30,000 votes worldwide, author Alex Bellos compiled a list of the ten most popular numbers, with 7 capturing nearly 10% of the total, reports Brandon Specktor in “Reader’s Digest” magazine. Seven’s triumph seems to reaffirm “a human fascination that goes back thousands of years,” with Babylonian tablets rife with sevens. Plus, there are the seven dwarfs, the seven samurai, the seven deadly sins, seven days of the week, even seventh heaven.

But Bellos believes something deeper is at work: Seven stands alone as the only number from 1-10 that cannot be multiplied or divided within the group: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 can each be doubled (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) and 9 can be divided by 3. As he went on to characterize the lucky number 7: “It’s unique, it’s alone, the outsider. And humans interpret this arithmetical property in cultural ways.” Q. Cat lovers, you may have wondered sometimes when observing your darling Fluffy, are cats really domesticated or merely tame? What is domestication, anyway? A. Domesticated animals are generally characterized as tame, with their tameness passed to their offspring; not able to mate and feed themselves without human assistance; not easily interbred with their wild counterparts; and exhibiting physical changes often seen (in mammals) as more baby-like. But cats haven’t changed much physically or genetically from their African wildcat ancestors. In fact, says Tina Hesman Saey in “Science News,” “Many felines still choose their own mates and hunt for food. Cats’ famed aloofness may be another clue that their domestication isn’t fully complete.”

But others disagree, arguing that domestication occurs when a hunter stops being interested in simply killing and eating an animal and starts being interested in the animal itself. In Mongolia, for example, horses roam free and their owners catch them, as needed, for riding or milking. “Once you’ve seen that, you can’t think that domestication is just about parking animals somewhere,” says evolutionary biologist Ludovic Orlando of the University of Copenhagen. “It’s about the process of interacting with them and developing a relationship with them.”