If you could have dinner with one person from history, who would you choose? For me, that person is Ray Bradbury—famed science fiction author of several short stories and novels, including Fahrenheit 451. I love all his works and credit him for inspiring my own writing. In high school, while writing a paper on Bradbury, I decided to write him a letter expressing my gratitude. [...]
Remember the analog days before social media and the digital world took over? When the internet had yet to be born, photos were kept in an album in the closet and movies were made with unstable film that could either catch fire at any moment or slowly deteriorate into a useless vinegary mess? Unsurprisingly, when you take these two possibilities, and then add that many studios [...]
Sometime over 30 thousand years ago, prehistoric humans found their way to a limestone cave in the Ardèche region of southern France. Here they drew more than one thousand images in what is believed to be the oldest cave art in the world. Around 20 thousand years ago, a rockfall covered the entrance and the cave remained undisturbed until December of 1994, when Eliette Brunel [...]
As a kid, one of the scariest movies I ever saw was Jurassic Park. I remember lying awake in bed at night, listening to the sound of a giant T. rex stomping down trees in my backyard. Sure, it was just the sound of the new dishwasher, but I didn’t know that until I confessed to my parents what I’d heard. Before Jurassic Park, all I knew [...]
On June 8, 2015, a children’s book, The Adventures of Alice Laselles, was published; its original manuscript is credited to “Alexandrina Victoria, aged 10 and ¾.” The dedication in the book reads: To my dear Mamma. This, my first attempt at composition, is affectionately and dutifully inscribed by her affectionate daughter, Victoria. As impressive as this vocabulary is for such a young girl, it [...]
Did you know a device considered by scholars to be the world’s oldest analog computer was created over 2,000 years ago? The device is officially named the Antikythera (ante-kith-er-uh) Mechanism. It was retrieved from an ancient shipwreck discovered in 1901 off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. The ship is believed to be a merchant vessel that met its end around 60 [...]
When my siblings and I were younger, we had a huge tub of Legos we’d amassed from birthdays and holidays. We would spread out all the Legos across my brothers’ room, sifting through them for exactly the pieces we needed for our creations—the wheels and chassis were always hotly contested, because even a combination airplane/restaurant/castle could be made infinitely cooler if it could also roll [...]
In July, some very old guests visited New Jersey: dinosaurs! If I had the time for the four-plus hour drive from Boston, I would have definitely gone to the Walking With Dinosaurs show. When I was little, my mom painted my whole room into a dinosaur mural. I had a Stegosaurus on one wall, an Apatosaurus (a.k.a. Brontosaurus) on another and even a Velociraptor tucked under the window. It was amazing. There was, [...]
The American Student Association of Community Colleges (ASACC) seeks to enhance student leadership by helping student governments at member schools address issues that affect students. Founded in 1984 by nine community colleges in the Great Lakes area, ASACC has been steadily growing and making a tangible impact on education legislation. On its website, ASACC credits itself with the passing of Section 127 of [...]