Today NASA announced that they are planning a mission to Europa! Europa is one of the many satellites of Jupiter and according to the US space agency, is the best candidate for alien life! How exciting is that? "As one of Jupiter's 63 known satellites, Europa is only a little bit smaller than our own Moon, with a diameter of 3,120 km. But what makes it really compelling to astrobiologists is that, beneath its icy surface lies a huge, liquid ocean, completely covering its rocky core.As astronomer Phil Plait explained over at his Bad Astronomy blog on Slate in November last year, this water is estimated to be salty, and also around 100 km thick - up to 10 times deeper than Earth’s oceans. In fact, telescope observations and data on the moon, gathered by passing spacecraft, suggest that Europa may hold two to three times more liquid water than Earth.
And where there’s liquid water, there’s often life, which makes it a very tantalising place to explore." - ScienceAlert.com
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Valentine's Day is in less than two weeks! Do you have a gift for your favorite geek and/or nerd yet? We have oodles of fun, geeky goodies still available!
As you can tell by the many days that have passed with no blog entries...our holidays were pretty busy! As always, our ETSY shop does much of our annual business between Thanksgiving and Christmas and this year had an additional dose of crazy built in...aka. The National Science Teachers Association Meeting/California Science Teachers Association Meeting in Long Beach during the first week of December. It proved to be a really crazy but wonderful season of geekiness. Stay tuned for more info on the NSTA/CSTA conference...it was so amazing it deserves a shout out all to itself! As the year is drawing to an end, this seemed interesting and relevant! We hope all of our customers, friends, and family have had an equally wonderful end to the year and are getting a chance to relax! As Black Friday approaches, I thought this would be helpful for all of our geeky gift givers! Feel free to contact us if you have any questions! :)
A Mighty Girl had a great piece about this wonderfully talented inventor and we thought we'd share since neither of us had heard too much about her before now. A Mighty Girl has some books about her and other awesome women of science on their website. Be sure to check it out!
"Today's Mighty Girl Hero is inventor Margaret "Mattie" E. Knight, who is widely considered the most famous female inventor of the 19th century. Nicknamed “Lady Edison,” Knight was responsible for nearly 100 inventions and held more than 20 patents on a wide array of inventions including a rotary engine, shoe-cutting machine, numbering machine, a dress and skirt shield, and most famously, a machine to fold and glue paper bags. Born in Maine in 1838, Knight frequently thought up ideas for new inventions and ways of doing things even as a child. At age 12, after witnessing a near-disaster at her brothers' place of employment, she was inspired to create a stop-motion device to prevent factory accidents. At the age of 30, she put together a wooden model for one of her ideas: a machine to fold and glue paper, forming a flat-bottomed paper bag -- the very type of paper bag you will find in grocery stores today. For this invention, for which the diagram is pictured here, she has been credited as the "inventor of the paper bag." For her incredible inventiveness and impressive accomplishments, Knight was presented with the Decoration of the Royal Legion of Honour by Queen Victoria in 1871, and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006." Text and photo source from A Mighty Girl Look what got delivered to our Zoo On Halloween! I can't wait to go see the little family! Mara is the happy Mom, and Adhama is Dad! This is the first hippopotamus calf the Zoo has had in 26 years. The zoo animal care staff isn't sure what the new baby's gender is, but they hope to be able to check soon! Did anyone see the lunar eclipse last night? I couldn't keep my eyes open until 3 a.m. but I did see the other one back in April. It was definitely blood red and AH-MAZING! I had a lot of fun taking those photos. I borrowed Wayne's fancy lens and set it up on the bbq outside (I don't have a tripod yet). It was pretty extraordinary and I DO regret not staying awake last night but thankfully Wayne snapped a pretty beautiful shot! It was taken at 3:53 a.m. I'll get the info about his camera and lens and update this post ASAP! We're very excited to announce some changes to our shop! We've been working on this for a while and it's so awesome that it's finally ready! We've changed the way we make our name-signs, cufflinks, and single tile necklaces! Instead of using scrabble tiles, we're now going to be using these lovely laminated tiles! They're still handmade but the process will do a lot less damage to our hands, which means we'll be able get orders completed much faster. We'll also be able to create customized name-signs at the science shows we go to (i.e. NSTA, CSTA, MakerFaire). Get ready for some nerdy fun everyone! These new tiles open up a whole new world of geeky possibilities so stay tuned! Let us know what you think! We'd love some feedback.
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Julie and JenavieveA geeky mother and daughter working to bring science and art together. To get to know us better, check out our about page! Archives
January 2017
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