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February 18, 2021 – (above photo from NASA website) – Members of the Perseverance Mars Rover team watch in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the first images arrive moments after the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is…
Read More »Linda Hoffman has a new post on her Apples, Art, and Spirit blog. This week, Linda writes about fertilizer. Specifically, the great harm being done by the widespread use of synthetic fertilizer (which she points out cause last week’s massive explosion in Lebanon). Linda calls for a new agricultural model which…
Read More »We are cross-posting this report from “The Body Politic: A View from Lowell, MA,” the blog of poet and community activist Emily Ferrara. A past contributor to this publication, Emily is allowing us to share her observations on the crisis at hand and other city matters. We are grateful. Watch…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Queen Elizabeth had nothing on us when she declared 1992 an annus horribilis. All she had to endure were the respective marital difficulties of son Andrew and daughter Anne, a tell-all book by Princess Di about Charles and…
Read More »My father collected stamps most of his life. Below is an item called a First Day Cover, which can be a card or an envelope with a postal cancellation mark on the day the stamp was released to the public. This one is from 1962, the stamp issued in connection…
Read More »In April 1998, UMass Lowell hosted what I believe was the first public forum to discuss what the web could or would do in the city. The event was billed as a town meeting and featured guest speakers, a panel discussion, a demonstration of a new online cultural magazine called…
Read More »Bill Nye the Science Guy at the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center last night (Image courtesy of Facebook page of Chancellor Marty Meehan). This is Commencement Day at UMass Lowell, and it’s wet out there. The grizzled and frizzed-hair ink-stained scribes of the media world will use all their…
Read More »“(We hope) that our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road, mental illness with a pill, poverty with a law, slums with a bulldozer, urban conflict with a gas, racism with a goodwill gesture.” – Philip E. Slater “Wisdom demands a new orientation of…
Read More »Helen Keller – an American author, political activist, and lecturer – was born on this day June 17, 1880. Her relationship with Annie Sullivan – who was sent to live at the Tewksbury Almshouse (now Hospital) after her mother died – is memorialized with a Mico Kaufman sculpture located next to…
Read More »For anyone facing surgery, the possibility of pain looms large. Imagine back to a time when options for “anesthesia” were limited to alcohol or the danger of opium. When a Boston dentist demonstrated the “power of ether” back in 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Jospeh Warren – a well-respected surgeon…
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