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11 Things We Learned This Week

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What did you learn this week? Let us know in the comments or at education@ngs.org.

This week we learned …

… an American won the Man Booker prize. Congratulations, Paul Beatty!

 

… what wind, currents, and geography tell us about how people first settled Oceania.

Map by David Eccles, courtesy Wikimedia. CC-BY-3.0

 

… the ancient Romans were brutal.

Roman gladiators, like these in a mosaic from the Villa Borghese in Rome, turned war into a game.
Photograph by James L. Stanfield, National Geographic

 

… what President Obama’s education legacy really is.

 

… the awesome origins of the High Five, just in time for the World Series.

 

… why Russia didn’t become a free-market democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Hey, kids! Remember the USSR?
Map by National Geographic, of course

 

… how this volcano stopped an earthquake in its tracks.

Mount Aso is the largest active volcano in Japan, and a major tourist attraction on the island of Kyushu.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

 

… we should remember H.G. Wells for his social predictions, not just his scientific ones.

 

… spiders can “tune” their webs.

Much in same way that notes travel along a plucked guitar string, spider silk transmits vibrations in different frequencies, sending information back to the spider.
Photograph by James L. Stanfield, National Geographic

 

… diamonds are forever, and your data might be, too.

Clever data storage devices?
Photograph by Victor R. Boswell, Jr., National Geographic

 

… we live in the age of funfetti.

Is there a dessert that wouldn’t be improved with this?
Photograph by Tiia Monto, courtesy Wikimedia. CC-BY-SA-3.0