Page Type: Middle

When Mychal Threets makes a video for his hundreds of thousands of social media followers, he usually talks about the place he loves the most: the library. Threets, a librarian himself, hopes to spread what he calls “library joy” by sharing uplifting stories and letting his followers know that the library is for everyone.

Threets was most recently the supervising librarian at the Fairfield Civic Center Library in Solano County, California, but his library journey started long ago. Beginning at age 3, he found magic among the books at his local library. When he got older, it made sense to carve out a career in public libraries. He got a job shelving books and then earned a master’s degree in library science. Today, he loves to see young people find the same library joy he did—children he refers to as “library kids.”

In one Instagram video, Threets tells his followers about a library kid who asked for chapter books about superheroes. Threets asked the kid if they were interested in graphic novels in addition to chapter books. The kid had never heard of graphic novels and was thrilled to find out there was even more to read about Black Panther and Thanos. They ended up borrowing two books and planned to return for more.

Threets is happy to see anyone return to the library—and hopes more people will make regular visits to their local public library. In addition to books, people at the Fairfield Civic Center Library can borrow musical instruments, baking equipment, and video games. There are audiobooks and resources in Spanish. There’s homework help, too. And in the bigger picture, the library is a place where everyone in the community can gather.

“The biggest resource is the library itself,” Threets told the Marin Independent Journal. “There is something for everybody.”

On February 23, Threets announced in an Instagram video that he would be leaving his job at the Fairfield Civic Center Library on March 1. Threets said he had made the decision in order to take care of his mental health, something he has always encouraged his followers to do. But Threets will keep a commitment to work with PBS as its resident librarian, a role he took earlier in February. Using social media, he’ll suggest books to read and continue to spread library joy.

When a teacher on New York state’s Long Island asked his science class to write messages and cast them into the Atlantic Ocean, he had no idea that one of the messages would help bring his students together more than 30 years later.

The bottle was found in early 2023 by Adam Travis, who spotted it in some marsh grass along Shinnecock Bay on Long Island. Inside, he found a piece of paper in perfect condition. It was dated 1992.

“Dear Finder,” the message read. “As part of an Earth Science project for 9th grade, this bottle was thrown into the Atlantic Ocean near Long Island. Please fill in the information below and return the bottle 2 us. Merci, Gracias, Danke, Thank You, Shawn and Ben.” 

The message was addressed from Mattituck High School on Long Island, so Travis went to the school’s alumni Facebook account and made a post about it. Pretty soon, comments were popping up.

The authors of the message were students in Richard E. Brooks’s Earth science class. The message in a bottle project was one of Brooks’s favorites. Brooks taught at Mattituck High School for 40 years. Based on the comments on the Facebook page, he was a favorite at his school. Many of his former students shared fond memories of their teacher.

“That shows that the things you do do matter, a lot, significantly,” Shawn Petretti, superintendent of the Mattituck-Cutchogue School District, told CBS News. “He had a significant impact.”

Brooks had passed away just a few months before, at age 83. The love he received on Facebook meant a lot to his son, John Brooks.

“My dad was never one to seek recognition, and it’s so fitting that he is now getting it,” John Brooks told CNN.

Over the years, people would stumble upon the bottles from Richard Brooks’s class in places as far away as Ireland and the Azores islands in Portugal, according to his son. Most bottles were found within four years. That makes the timing of this recent discovery—and its location close to home—very special.

“This development is just such a shot in the arm of positivity and heartwarming energy,” John Brooks said. He told CBS he planned to throw a message of his own into the ocean. He’ll write it about his dad.

“Maybe 32 years later, someone else will pick this up and have a smile on their face,” he said.

Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and SZA may have dominated the 2024 Grammy Awards, but not all the winners were recording artists. The 2024 Music Educator Grammy Award went to Annie Ray, a music teacher who started a program for students with disabilities.

Ray, who is orchestra director and head of the performing arts department at Annandale High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, started the Crescendo Orchestra to give all students the opportunity to learn about music. The students in the program have developmental and intellectual disabilities, and many are not verbal. But music is a language everyone shares, says Ray, who comes from a musical family and has played the harp since she was 5 years old.  

That belief helped spark the idea for the orchestra back in 2021. Ray teamed up with special education teachers to design the program. Students start by learning about rhythm, first with scarves and then with egg shakers. Eventually, they practice on a cardboard version of an orchestra instrument, learning how to care for it and store it properly. Finally, they receive the real thing. Ray also started a parent program that gives the students’ caregivers the opportunity to learn the same instruments as their children.

If you’re interested in making videos simply by typing a text prompt, Google may soon have just the tool for you. It’s called Google Lumiere.

Lumiere uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate videos based on a written description. A promotional video shows a text prompt reading, “Astronaut on the planet Mars making a detour around his base.” The resulting video shows a person in a space suit walking around the Red Planet. A prompt asking for a dog in sunglasses driving a car leads to a video showing a dog in sunglasses driving a car. These aren’t existing videos that Google found. They’re generated by AI, so the possibilities are endless.

Google isn’t the first company to develop this sort of technology. Many other companies have text-to-image creators, and a few have developed text-to-video generators like Lumiere. But many people who have watched Lumiere video clips report that, while Google’s product isn’t perfect, it creates the most realistic AI videos yet.

Stone Age teens weren’t familiar with bubble gum, but they did chew another type of gum. Remnants of that sticky stuff are revealing a lot about their diet and oral health.

The “gum” in question is pitch, a sticky substance that comes from trees. Scientists found bits of prehistoric pitch at a site in Sweden in the 1990s. The pitch contained human saliva as well as teeth marks, indicating that it had been chewed. Further study revealed that the pitch was chewed between 9,890 and 9,540 years ago by male and female teens, as well as kids as young as 5 years old.

It’s going to be a loud spring in parts of the United States. In a very rare occurrence, two broods of cicadas will emerge almost simultaneously, after years underground.

Periodical cicadas live for years, but they spend most of their lives underground in the nymph (immature) life stage. Every 13 or 17 years (depending on the species), the insects will emerge as adults, shedding their exoskeletons and taking to the skies to mate. Scientists call each group that emerges a brood.

In late April and early May 2024, the Great Southern Brood, also known as Brood XIX, will emerge in several states, from Iowa down to Louisiana and from Oklahoma east to Virginia. It’s been 13 years since this brood was seen. Beginning in mid-May—after 17 years—the Northern Illinois Brood (or Brood XIII) will appear in Illinois as well as parts of Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan. Both broods will appear in southern Illinois. It’s extremely rare for the emergence of these two broods to overlap. The last time they appeared simultaneously was in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was in the White House!

“Nobody alive today will see it happen again,” entomologist Floyd W. Shockley of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History told the New York Times.

Thousands of years ago, the Roman Empire ruled over much of Europe and North Africa—and maintained its power with the help of armed soldiers. Now, a piece of Roman armor that was discovered in more than 100 pieces in Scotland has been reconstructed.

The arm guard was designed to be worn on the right arm of a soldier as he held a sword in that hand. The metal, along with attached leather padding, would have helped cushion blows from enemy weapons. Experts say that, while most arm guards were made of less expensive and more durable iron, this one was made of brass, suggesting that its owner was of a high military rank.

“It’s absolutely amazing. You get the sense of the protection this person had—and also the prestige,” Fraser Hunter of National Museums Scotland told the Observer. “It would have gleamed gold and would have looked absolutely spectacular when he was wearing it.”

Kwesi Bowman was 21 when he posed for a photo wearing a blue Civil War Union army uniform. Bowman didn’t fight in the Civil War. In fact, he was born in the 21st century. But his great-great grandfather, Andrew Jackson Smith, was a war hero who risked his life to carry his regiment’s battle flag through enemy fire during the Battle of Honey Hill in 1864. Bowman’s photo shoot was part of a project in which descendants of Black Civil War soldiers recreate portraits of their ancestors.

The project is the brainchild of British photographer Drew Gardner. Gardner began taking photos of the descendants of famed historical figures many years ago, but he recently turned his attention to people who changed history but may never have been recognized for it. From there, he decided to try to track down descendants of enslaved people, including Black men who fought in the Civil War.

In 2023, Bowman and many other descendants gathered at a studio in New York City, where Gardner took portraits of them using a 19th-century camera. Each descendant reproduced the pose from their ancestor’s portrait and wore a near-copy of his uniform.

Most of these soldiers are not as well known as Andrew Jackson Smith, whose grandson, Andrew Bowman, Sr. (Kwesi’s grandfather), successfully campaigned to get him a Medal of Honor—the U.S. government’s highest military decoration—in 2001, decades after his death. And it wasn’t easy to link most of the soldiers with their descendants. While Americans whose families immigrated to the United States can often trace their family histories, descendants of enslaved people were included in fewer of the historical documents that researchers often rely on. For example, when enslaved people were listed in records, they were often unnamed. So Garner and a team of researchers had a lot of work to do.

In one case, the team set out to research a Civil War soldier named David Miles Moore, Jr., who was only a teenager when he enlisted in the Union army in 1863. Moore served in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the unit of Black soldiers later depicted in the 1989 movie Glory. The researchers unearthed a record showing that Moore had filed for a military pension in 1897 and then found his name in the 1900 U.S. Census. From there, they traced Moore’s family to his living descendants, the Flowers family. It was 9-year-old Neikoye Flowers who recreated a portrait of Moore, holding a drum like the one his ancestor held.

Austin Morris recreated a portrait of his ancestor, Lewis Douglass, a Civil War soldier and the son of famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Morris, who is 20, has always known that Frederick Douglass was in his family tree. But dressing up like Lewis made him feel a special connection to the Douglasses.

“I was looking at his picture, thinking: I’m 20. He was in his 20s when the picture was taken. He fought in the war, and he was one of the first Blacks to sign up for it,” Morris told Smithsonian Magazine.

Neikoye Flowers’ mom, Janisse, says this portrait project is giving her son and his twin sister a similar sense of pride.

“They’re going to remember everything about this trip,” Janisse told Smithsonian. “And hopefully it turns that page in history where they can brag about this to their kids and grandkids.”

Ask a driver what’s most challenging about operating a car, and they’re likely to say it’s parallel parking—maneuvering a vehicle into a space between two cars already parked on the side of a street. Parallel parking requires three precise turns of the steering wheel (more turns might be needed for a tight parking spot or with a nervous driver). But what if a car’s wheels could rotate 90 degrees, allowing the car to move sideways, right into that spot? A new technology makes this, and more, possible.

Hyundai Mobis’s new e-corner system allows a vehicle’s wheels to turn so they’re perpendicular to the vehicle. This enables drivers to move the car sideways (Hyundai calls this “crab driving” because crabs move sideways), diagonally, and even in a full, 360-degree spin. The Hyundai Motor Group says this makes it easier not only to parallel park but also to maneuver around parking lots, narrow streets, and obstacles in the road.

When antique collector Sara Rivers Cofield found strings of unrelated words written on two pieces of paper from the 1880s, she had no idea what they meant—and neither did many code experts. Now, the mystery has been solved. It turns out that Rivers Cofield’s mysterious messages were probably old-fashioned weather reports.

Rivers Cofield found the messages in a hidden pocket of an antique dress she’d purchased in 2013. The handwritten words didn’t make much sense together. In fact, they didn’t seem related at all. One line read, “Bismark omit leafage buck bank,” and there were many more like it. Perplexed, Rivers Cofield went online and asked for help. Clearly, this was some kind of code—but what code was it, and how could it be cracked?