Ioannis Ikonomou is a hyperpolyglot or a person who is gifted with the ability to learn a lot of languages. Currently Ikonomou if fluent in 32 languages which is beneficial to his job as an European Commission translator. By the time he was twenty Ikononmou already knew 20 languages. What was really cool about the interview was that he kept changing the language he was speaking it went from German to Mandarin to Italian to many more. Ikonomou gave some tips on how to make learning a language easier which is going out and traveling to where the language is and to speak to the natives there you should also speak the language every day. By the end of the interview he answered the mystery of what the most complicated language to learn is. Mandarin.

http://www.greatbigstory.com/stories/the-ultimate-polyglot-this-man-speaks-32-languages?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool

            The artist Sean Yoro’s latest piece Puliki, “to embrace” in Hawaian, creates amazing works of art that are completely eco-friendly. Yoro uses natural chalk and water to create his works which can be easily washed away. The idea of Puliki is to send a message about environmental issues such as climate change, droughts, wild fires, and deforestation. Through this message Yoro hopes to get more people involved in protecting the natural world. The image shown above was painted somewhere in the Pacific Northwest that recently suffered from wild fires.

Sean Yoro is known as the artist Hula and does mainly portraits. Yoro says that “One of the exciting things about painting portraits is being able to bring life and emotion to objects and surfaces that were once without. Also these figures just seem to match with the moods. A mysterious surreal combination.” If interested to see more of his works check out his website the first link. If you want more information about this story check out the second link.

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http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/03/arts/hula-puliki-forest-mural/index.html

On Thursday March 2, 2017 the European Parliament voted to pass a nonbinding resolution for the reintroduction of traveling visas for American citizens going to and European Union nations. This act is in response to America’s refusal to give visa free entry to five EU countries; Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland, and Romania. While this is nonbinding the act it encourages the European Commission to confront the Washington’s new administration. This Parliament’s vote gave the Commission two months to impose visas for American travelers unless America waives the visas before then. For more information check out the link.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/world/europe/eu-visas-parliament-united-states.html?_r=0

On February 22, 2017, NASA announced that one of their telescopes in Belgium revealed seven Earth-sized planets about 40 light-years away. This planetary system is located around an ultra-cool dwarf star called Trappist-1 named after the telescope used for their discovery. Three of these planets are located in the habitual zone but since the planets are all extremely close to each other they all have a possibility of water. Not to mention that from the surface of these planets you could easily see the others in the sky. With the launch of NASA’s new telescope in 2018 they will be able to detect if the planets have chemical fingerprints of water, methane, and oxygen which are key to the creation of atmospheres and making the planets habitability. With these seven new planets NASA has taken to twitter to see what people want to call them. I thought this was a great example of crowd sourcing that we talked about this past week. The first links down below are for the video I used and the second is if you guys wanted more information about how NASA discovered these planets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKFaAS30X8

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-telescope-reveals-largest-batch-of-earth-size-habitable-zone-planets-around