Six STEM Tweets

Six tweets that celebrate engineering and all things STEM.

I scroll so you don’t have to.

Welcome friends!

And thanks to the folks who are sharing this with others so they can sign-up and stay informed while also being entertained.

All past issues of the newsletter are online

Let’s get to it…

#1

The European Space Agency (ESA) in partnership with Japan have sent a probe to Mercury, the least explored planet of the inner Solar System. The name of the mission is BepiColombo.

It did a flyby of Mercury last week and captured images of Mercury’s south pole.

Some stats:

• 2 orbiters

• 8 year cruise

• 9 planet flybys

More details of this mercurial mission are at https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo

#2

This finding is a really good example of applying information from one field of science to another and making things better.

Optical physicists have known about using specific dyes to suppresses refractive index mismatching but no has applied it to animal tissue imaging till now. This allows scientists to look “inside” animals.

More details are on Science.org and CNN

#3

I really like this framing. “The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.” Well said!

The article can be read at https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/121/11/1771/30038/The-importance-of-stupidity-in-scientific-research

#4

C is likely the most over-worked letter in science.

#5

3 crewed launches in the next 3 weeks! 🤩 

#6

Technology has gotten quieter. And IMO, more sterile. We stopped hearing it work - now it’s just glass slabs and carbon-fiber cases.

This is issue #39 of this SixSTEMTweets newsletter.

A few fun things about 39:

• 39 is the sum of five consecutive primes (3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13) and also is the product of the first and the last of those consecutive primes

• The atomic number of yttrium

• Japanese internet chat slang for "Thank You" when written with numbers: 3 (三, san) and 9 (九, kyū).

• The code for international direct-dialed phone calls to Italy (Good to get back to a working code after two consecutive nonoperational codes to countries that don’t exist any more)

• And for the trivia buffs, 39 out of 55 members of the Philadelphia Convention delegates actually signed the United States Constitution

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