Six STEM Tweets

Six tweets that celebrate engineering and all things STEM.

I scroll so you don’t have to.

Thanks to everyone who has forwarded this to others. Let’s grow the community of curiosity! 😀 

#1 🤯 

What a week for space fans!

#2 🤯 

Harshals everywhere doing cool things! ✨ 

(Ignore the typo in the spelling. They didn’t have spell check back then 😆 )

#3 🤯 

The decorations were apparently selected from the work boards of various members of the department, and so are snippets of real mathematical workings.

I love whimsical architecture.

#4 🤯 

And humans walked on the moon less than a decade later. One of our greatest scientific achievements. So far!

#5 🤯 

Mine is: Kooky Milli Smoom

What’s your subatomic particle?

#6 🤯 

Here’s the full list:

International Space Station:

• Matthew Dominick

• Michael Barratt

• Jeanette Epps

• Alexander Grebenkin

• Oleg Kononenko

• Tracy Caldwell Dyson

• Nikolai Chub

• Butch Wilmore

• Suni Williams

Soyuz MS-26, en route to ISS:

• Don Pettit

• Aleksey Ovchinin

• Ivan Vagner

Dragon Resilience, free-flying Polaris Dawn mission:

• Jared Isaacman

• Scott Poteet

• Sarah Gillis

• Anna Menon

Tiangong Space Station:

• Ye Guangfu

• Li Cong

• Li Guangsu

This is issue #40 of this SixSTEMTweets newsletter.

A few fun things about 40:

• "Fourty" was the preferred spelling till the 1700s when "forty" replaced it as the standard spelling

• Forty is the only integer whose English name has its letters in alphabetical order.

• Forty is a Harshad (not a typo, this time 😒 ) number

  • Curious about what’s a Harshad number? Reply to this and ask me! I will explain in the next issue.

• 40 also lies between the 8th pair of sexy primes (37, 43)

  • We talked about “sexy primes” in issue 37. I love how mathematicians have fun with numbers. 😆 

• 40 is an “abundant” number, because the sum of its proper divisors is greater than 40 (1 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 8 + 10 + 20 = 50)

• The atomic number of zirconium

• Negative forty is the unique temperature at which the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales correspond; that is, −40 °F = −40 °C.

• The code for direct dial international phone calls to Romania

• The word “quarantine” - isolation to prevent the spread of epidemic disease, derives from a Venetian word meaning 'forty days'

I love the feedback. Keep it coming. RB wrote: Very interesting and informative, especially for me who is now miles away from technology. Well presented and crisp.

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