Six STEM Tweets

Six tweets that celebrate engineering and all things STEM.

I scroll so you don’t have to.

Hello curious friends, only and new.

Please share this with others. And hit ‘reply’ to send me your thoughts and suggestions.

#1 🤯 

The “beep” that started the space race.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the movie “October Sky”. It’s on Amazon Prime and is a true story of the impact that Sputnik had on Homer Hickam.

Interesting anecdote about the movie - it’s based on a book called “Rocket Boys” and the two titles are anagrams of each other. 😄 

NASA has a pretty cool documentary about the early days of the space agency.

#2 🤯 

Zoom…zoom…

#3 🤯 

This is a really interesting experiment with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Using semiconductors to convert CO2 to ethylene is the modern alchemy.

More details are in the Nature article.

#4 🤯 

Nobel prize season is here! 💗 

This paper in Nature investigates the academic family tree of all 727 winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics. The results suggest that part of what made Nobel laureates successful is that they learned from the best - their mentors, who were often other Nobel laureates or scholars closely connected to the Nobel family tree. The differences across disciplines indicate that the fields have varying levels of collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Mentors are important!

#5 🤯 

Just the right amount of inspirational nerdiness! 😁

#6 🤯 

Only if you ignore the part about two parallel sides. But I love this thinking outside the square box.

Thanks for all the feedback about the mid-week issue last week. It’s probably not going to be a regular thing but you never know 😃 

This is issue #44.

A few fun facts about 44

• Forty-four is a repdigit (repeated digit) and palindromic number in decimal.

  • Last issue, 43, is a repdigit in base 6. This is easier to understand 🙂 

• 44 is a tribonacci number, preceded by 7, 13, and 24, whose sum it equals.

  • A tribonaaci number is like a Fibonacci number - but is the sum of the previous three numbers.

  • The tribonnaci series is: 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 4, 7, 13, 24, 44, 81…

• 44 is a happy number (not to be confused with a harshad number - which means joy in Sanskrit)

  • In number theory, a happy number is a number which eventually reaches 1 when replaced by the sum of the square of each digit.

  • The confirmation of how 44 is a happy number is left as an exercise for the reader 😁 

• The atomic number of ruthenium

• 44 is the ITU country code for international direct dial telephone calls to the United Kingdom

• In the song "44 Fours" by Jay-Z, he rhymes the words four, for and fore 44 times. This song is a follow-up from the song "22 Two's".

• In 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated (on March 15 - the Ides of March)

That’s it for this issue.

Hit ‘reply’ to tell me what you think.

And hit ‘forward’ to share with your friends and family.

Let’s all celebrate science and engineering and curiosity.

Best wishes,

Harshal