We wrote about Boyan Slat, the water rocket obssessed teenager (that’s what his mom called him on telly recently) who shot off some 101 rocket simultaneously last year on 20 June. This year, with the help of students from the Delft University of Technology and sponsoring from the university, he launched 213 rockets, which earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.
(Dear Dutch press: you’ve never spelled ‘Guinness’ properly as far as I can remember. Please learn to spell it with 2 nn and 2 ss. It’s that simple, think of a car with four wheels.)
Somehow, as I said last year, this kid is probably going to go to the Delft University of Technology when he grows up.
Since then, Slat’s modest website wetenschapvoordummies (Science for dummies) has been replaced by a much slicker site called gottalaunch with all kinds of pictures, videos and cool stuff.
Last month, three coin treasures were found in Groningen during archaeological digs. Don’t get all excited though, as a coin treasure is defined as anything over five coins, or as 
A judge in Haarlem ruled last month that acupuncturists who are also certified Doctors of Medicine qualify for a tax exemption that other acupuncturists must miss out on, 
A special type of dredger used for mining sand in the Groote Wielen area of Den Bosch enabled amateur paleontologists Anton Verhagen and Dick Mol not only to add to their collection of bones, but also to keep track of the corresponding geological eras. The sand harvested by cutter-suction dredger Den Otter was to be used for building a new, nearby neighbourhood, and had to be scraped layer by layer in order to separate high-grade building sand from the rest. This method of dredging is slower, but because it separates out different types of sand early on, it’s apparently still cost-effective.
The elderly avoid tear-jerker television programmes such as Memories, Spoorloos (Lost without a trace, about finding lost family members), and Het Familiediner (The Family Dinner, about broken family relations), according to research by Margot van der Goot at the University of Nijmegen. She says these shows evoke emotions that the elderly typically try to avoid. Van der Goot will get her Ph.D. in two weeks based on a study on the viewing patterns of people older than 65, 
Two scientists from Leiden University, Joke Bouwstra and Robert Rissman, invented a gel that has the same healing properties as “the buttery coating that protects and nurtures a foetus’s developing skin,” reports New Scientist. Apart from helping premature babies, the ‘baby butter’ could also be used for other applications. 
