March 3, 2017
Pretty embarrassing yet exciting ending to the Oscars last weekend with #envelopegate! Well here is a smorgasbord of interesting tidbits to get you through the potentially less exiting weekend coming up:
- Where’s the permission slip?!?!? Remember those amazing school field trips to different museums where you got to run around, learn things and not be in class? Well a national push for #museumadvocacy2017 hit the ground running this week in an effort to garner support for museum funding across the country. Check out the Alliance of Museumsinformation to see if your lawmakers are in support of funding museum services!
- Space Goddesses! The LEGO craze is going nowhere fast, and now it’s making a statement! A news editor at MIT submitted a “Women of NASA” design to the LEGO Ideas competition and gathered enough votes for the company to consider manufacturing it! The five historic pioneersincluded in the set are: Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist, Katherine Johnson, a physicist and mathematician, Sally Ride, an astronaut and physics professor, Nancy Grace Roman, the “Mother of Hubble” and NASA executive, and Mae Jemison, a medically trained-astronaut!
- Shoot for the stars! To continue this wonderful, outer space nerdfest, the Planetary Science Vision 2050workshop was held this week where some of the smartest people around came together to discuss future plans for NASA’s Planetary Science Division. Just days after announcing NASA found new planets (!), leading scientists started setting goals for new solar system exploration projects by 2050! Check out some crazy plans for #v2050 experts are putting on the To-Do List. Book your shuttle now!
- What’s an answering machine? For some lower brow fun, adults both over and under the age of 34 took to Twitter to share their funny #MillennialPrankCalls ideas until many started to point out that millennials do not actually make phone calls!
- Happy Fat Tuesday! Show me your Paczkis! This week we celebrated #FatTuesday or what we in Chicago call it #PaczkiDay! People took to the streets, bakeries and other eateries to fill up on tasty goodies. Different regions shared their own spin on the classic binge-fest like the Coney Paczki or #PancakeTuesday.
- Oh the weather outside is…weather… In case you have been sleeping through the last few weeks, the weather has been playing with our emotions a bit. To keep people focused on the prize that is warmer days, #SpringIn5Wordsbrought some hope and humor to the up-and-down temps! My favorite is one of the cheesiest posts as well as learning what Flexxball is!!
- It’s not personal, it’s just business! This week the company behind the social app Snapchat made its trading debut with an IPO at $17/share. But the juicy story came out the day before when leaked emails revealed its sales team was practicing some sketchy tactics to sell ads. Let’s keep it classy, Snap.
- Lookin’ good for your age! Scientists believe they have found the remains of the earliest habitable environment on Earth in an ancient hydrothermal vent. These potentially 3.77 billion-year-old fossils may hold the key to knowing for sure how life began on this planet, and just how old everything really is! And speaking of an earlier generation of life, some other awesome scientists used laser technology to create detailed images of what many dinosaurs looked like hundreds of millions of years ago!
- Good night, Babar! Remember that all-nighter you pulled? Elephants do it all the time! Scientists discovered that while elephants in zoos sleep around 6 hours a day, elephants in the wild typically get just 2 hours of shut-eye a night, with many matriarchs staying awake for several days at a time!
- Small but mighty! On a smaller scale, it turns out bees are incredibly intelligent. Many assumed the small brain-size in bees was holding them back cognitively, but they were wrong! Scientists were able to teach bees how to play football to get a reward! *Mic drop*
- Set the pace to grueling… In perhaps the most inspiring of events this week, a 99-year-old runner faced off against a 92-year-old speedster in what turned out to be a clash of TITANS! Forget the Patriots Super Bowl comeback, this almost centenarian just dominated his sprightly opponent! #Heroes. Happy Friday! Have a great weekend!
