Fridaygram: startup moms, ape memories, persistent projects
By +Scott
Knaster, Google Developers
Blog Editor
Sometimes you have a baby and a startup at the same time. For times like those, Google’s
Campus Tel Aviv recently held
Campus for
Moms, a startup course designed to be friendly to babies and moms taking care of
them. The nine-week course included technical topics like the evolution of cloud computing,
legal information, financial advice, and more. The classroom was filled with bean bags and
mats so that moms and babies could hang out together during sessions.
Graduates finished up by presenting their ideas to potential investors and class leaders. And
during the course of the nine-week class session, four participants announced new launches:
their babies were born.
Human babies build memories as they learn and grow, but what about other primates? A recent
study provides evidence that
chimps and orangutans
can remember things for longer and more precisely than previously thought.
Researchers found that both species could instantly recall an event (finding a particular
tool) that took place three years earlier. The animals could also distinguish events that took
place two weeks prior. Could ape startups be next?
Finally – and we really do mean
finally – the
pitch drop experiment
at
Trinity College Dublin has come to a
successful conclusion. After nearly 70 years of trying, the project now has video proof that
tar pitch sometimes behaves like a liquid and, given enough time and the right conditions,
will form drops that fall from the main body. The experiment started in 1944, and
now it’s done. Hooray!
This weekend, why not start a multi-decade experiment of your own? Maybe we can even
feature it on some future edition of Fridaygram,
if it still exists when your own pitch-drop moment happens.
