Getting started on winter sowing, LEGO’s collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a well-known Monet painting, and storing data which will last for millenia are a few of the interesting stories I’ve enjoyed in the past month.
I hope you enjoy them, too!
What I Found Interesting
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For folks in the northern hemisphere, it’s that time of year for winter sowing. (This year marks my third year of winter sowing native plants.)
Susan Brownstein has a wonderful winter sowing story following up on Hawken School teachers Nick Fletcher and Claudia Taus, who this year are growing seedlings in 500 milk jugs
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Lio Cundiff was sitting on a bench by Lake Michigan in Chicago, calling his aunt to wish her a belated happy birthday when he saw a baby stroller blow into the lake.
Cundiff jumped into the 30-degree Fahrenheit water, treaded water for several minutes while holding onto the stroller and waiting for additional help. The eight-month-old baby was saved.
I didn’t see much news coverage of this story; I hope other folks share it with their family and friends.
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Stunning.
LEGO collaborated with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for their latest Art series kit: Claude Monet’s Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies.
The team meticulously created a tactile 3D surface by layering tiles and plates in both vertical and horizontal directions, mimicking the brushwork and carefully adapting Monet’s subtle palette of hues within LEGO’s signature color options.
The kit has almost 3,200 pieces and will be available for purchase for $249.99 (US dollars) on March 4, 2026.
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The 2026 Winter Olympics are over and I will miss watching the competitions. So many stories about the events, competitors, joyous wins, and devastating heartbreaks.
There’s one story I’ll remember with a smile: when a four-legged Olympic competitor wowed cross-country ski fans.
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A city-wide experiment of infecting mosquitoes with natural bacteria lowered dengue risk by 70% in Singapore.
Faculty at the Environmental Health Institute in Singapore’s National Environment Agency, along with a few collaborators, selected 15 densely-populated areas of the city-state and randomly divided them into groups that would receive a transplanted swarm of IIT-SIT male mosquitoes, and others that would receive none.
Until I read this news story, I wasn’t aware of the increase in dengue in recent years. Good to learn about effective options for controlling the tropical disease and the mosquitoes that spread it.
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Imagine storing data on glass instead of magnetic tape or hard drives, which degrade in as little at ten years.
That’s what scientists at Microsoft’s Cambridge office proposed in their Project Silica paper published on February 18, 2026. The paper describes a high-energy laser imprinting on glass, the kind used in ovenware.
The research team encoded two million printed books, 4.8 terabytes of data, on a coaster-sized glass device.
