March 20th: National & International Days, Celebrations and Observances

Looking at the calendar - March 20th marks a good time to make small changes around here. Native flowers planted in the yard bring more than color - they attract everything from finches to butterflies. If you hear frogs in your neighborhood, local research groups would love to know about it. They track these things. And remember those old-school friendly notes? Mr. Rogers was onto something there.

The morning air hits different in springtime. Most days I spot something worth mentioning - maybe a returning bird or that first crocus. Sometimes I bring my phone to snap pictures of whatever's sprouting or moving about. Others in the area do the same.

Might want to check those garden hoses now - nobody needs surprise leaks once planting starts. The farm stands are starting to open too, if you're looking for fresh stuff. Oh, and since it's International Francophonie Day, there's always room for a quick "Joyeux Printemps" - that's French for happy spring, by the way.

March 20th marks several key scientific milestones. Each shows how nature and space affect life on Earth.

• Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity in 1916. His brief 46-page paper proved massive objects actually bend the space around them. This insight reshaped our grasp of gravity and sparked decades of new research into space and time.
• In 2010, Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull erupted without warning. Ash clouds shut down air travel across Europe. The event stranded 10 million passengers and reminded everyone that geological forces can still override modern technology.
• The North Atlantic skies offered an unusual display in 2015. A total solar eclipse darkened the morning just as winter turned to spring. The timing matched perfectly with that year's equinox, splitting day and night into equal parts worldwide.
• That evening, a larger-than-normal moon rose in the sky. This supermoon, combined with the earlier eclipse and equinox, made March 20th, 2015, stand out in astronomical records.

Five pioneers share March 20th as their date of birth. After selling The North Face, Douglas Tompkins left the business world behind. He spent decades buying land in South America for conservation. Today, over 2 million acres stand protected - stretching from Pumalín Park in Chile to vast spaces across Argentina.

Maud Menten started practicing medicine in 1879 when most Canadian medical schools refused to admit women. She persisted. Her work produced the Michaelis-Menten equation, a formula labs worldwide still use to analyze enzyme behavior.

B.F. Skinner changed how we see human behavior. His "Skinner Box" experiments revealed patterns nobody had noticed before. Later, in "Walden Two," he took these ideas about conditioning and imagined an entire community built around them.

Mary Roach writes about science - the weird parts that nobody else touches. Her books pull back the curtain on topics most authors avoid. "Gulp" explores the strange science of eating. "Stiff" examines what happens to bodies after death.

At Dow Chemical in the 1960s, Bettye Washington Greene became the company's first African-American woman to hold a Ph.D. in chemistry. Her polymer research improved everyday products. Latex and adhesives work better because of her discoveries. She also mentored younger scientists, showing them what was possible.