3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts 

THE FACTS  

* New Mexico is testing a unique way to encourage drivers to slow down: A stretch of Route 66 – the “Musical Highway” – contains rumble strips that play “America the Beautiful” when a car passes over them at the legal limit of 45 mph.

  * A new CDC study (published in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases) revealed that in December of last year, about 2% of all blood donated on the West Coast contained COVID-19 antibodies. This suggests the virus had found its way to the US before China alerted the world, and a month before the first case was identified in the US.

* Koala fingerprints are so similar to human fingerprints that they could easily be confused. “Although it’s extremely unlikely that koala prints would be found at the scene of a crime, police should at least be aware of the possibility,” says Maciej Henneberg, a biological anthropologist and forensic scientist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. At press time, Amaru did not know whether Professor Henneberg was joking.

THE NUMBERS 

* 35 – the number of dollars paid to graphic design student Carolyn Davidson in 1971 to design Nike’s “Swoosh” logo – a symbol of what has become the most valuable apparel brand in the world. (According to The Motley Fool, the brand is worth $34.8 billion.)

* 65 – the percent of global Bitcoin mining power that is located in China. Crypto mining is the process by which specialized computers are used to support, encode, and protect digital currency transactions. It is also the only way to acquire cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) without putting any money down. China’s domination of the Bitcoin market stands to further their push to become the world’s dominant economic power by backing their Yuan with gold and Bitcoin, potentially replacing the dollar in the future.

* 3.75 billion – the number of years it will take for the Andromeda galaxy to collide with our own. According to NASA, the Andromeda is on a collision course with the Milky Way at a rate of 68 miles per second.

THE THOUGHTS 

* “The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

* “To thrive in life you need three bones. A wishbone. A backbone. And a funny bone.” – Reba McEntire

* “Our culture is fast becoming one that rewards failure rather than success, luck rather than skill, weakness rather than strength, neediness rather than deservedness, and arrogance rather than humility.” – Michael Masterson