An inscription using the ABCs was discovered in Egypt. It may be the oldest such example of someone writing a mnemonic(ways to remember things using the first letters of the words to create a phrase) message to remember the order of the ABCs. Perhaps,you have used the following mnemonic to remember the order of the planets. "My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles"", when Pluto was still considered a planet. Archeologists say the message, written on limestone, dates back about 3400 years. The ancient Phoenicians(present day Lebanon) developed the first alphabet when most people were using forms of picture writing. An alphabet was a faster method of writing.

Photograph from livescience.com

Each state can have two statues in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Florida is replacing one of its two statues, that of a Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith with African American activist and educator, Mary McLeod Bethune. This will be the first such statue honoring a state’s African American woman in Statuary Hall. Bethune, the only of 17 siblings to get an education and the child of former slaves, went on to found a school for girls in Florida, Bethune-Cookman College. She started the National Council of Negro Women as well as served as Vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons.

Photograph of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune from tampabay.com

Ryleigh Taylor, 11, from Tennessee, made an amazing discovery while walking along Douglas Lake. She found something resting on a rock and picked it up. The curious "stone" turned out to be a very rare fossil. It was that of a trilobite, a marine arthropod, that lived millions of years ago. Not only was the fossil a very unusual find, but an associate professor of paleobiology at the University of Tennessee, said that it dates back 475 million years old (Paleozoic era) and it is almost a complete trilobite! Ryleigh says she hopes other kids will read about her discovery and get outside to explore nature. She also said she hopes that her discovery will spark an interest in kids, to things in science. She is giving the fossil to a museum so other people can see and learn about trilobites.