Today’s fun fact is about the first usage of the term “Underground Railroad”. The man who inspired the term was Tice Davids, a runaway slave from Kentucky. His former owner had assumed Tice had drowned when he swam across the Ohio River to freedom. Later, in an interview for the paper, the slave owner mentioned that if Tice had actually escaped, he must’ve taken “an underground railroad”. Thus, the term was coined, and the rest is history!

Hello once again! In honor of black history month I will be posting a random fun fact about black history everyday for the whole month. Since today is the 6th, I’ll provide 6 facts for the days I missed. Stay warm!

1. Cathay Williams was the first and only female Buffalo Soldier, posing as a man named William Cathay to enlist in the 38th infantry in 1866. She served for two years before a doctor discovered that she was a woman, which led to her discharge.

2. Both Condoleezza Rice and Martin Luther King, Jr. started college when they were just 15 years old. She studied political science at the University of Denver; he majored in sociology at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

3. Journalist Ida Wells-Barnett refused to give up her railcar seat for a white man in 1884, and bit a conductor on the hand when he tried to force her to give it up. Eventually, she was dragged off the train. She sued the railroad and initially won, but the decision was overturned.

4. Black ingenuity helped devise creative plans to escape enslavement. In 1848, husband and wife William and Ellen Craft made it to the North, and eventually England, when she dressed as a white man and he posed as one of her slaves. A year later, Henry “Box” Brown mailed himself to freedom in a shipping box during a 27-hour trip from Richmond to Philadelphia.

5. The hair brush, lawn mower, cellphone, refrigerator, and the air conditioner were all inventions from African-American designers.

6. Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman elected to Congress and the first black major-party presidential candidate. Unbelievably, she survived three assassination attempts during her 1972 campaign.

Find out if you’re colorblind with the Ishihara 38 Plates test. This test is designed to identify red-green colorblindness, and was invented by Dr. Ishihara in the early 19th century. You can take the test here. What are your results? Comment and let me know!

Bring out your creative side with the MaKey MaKey. The MaKey MaKey allows you to make a keyboard out of anything – for example, hook it up to a banana and instead of pressing the space bar, press the banana to get the same effect! But why stop at bananas? You can hook up the MaKey MaKey to anything that conducts electricity – bananas, modeling clay, pencil lead, water, paint, flowers, coins, people… the possibilities are endless! Check out these videos to get an idea of the projects people have made.

What have you made with MaKey MaKey? Comment to share!

Check out this word game invented by a couple of students at MIT. The object is to use six different “weapons” in order to change one word into a different word. If you can use a weapon to change the word, you have “defeated” that word. Try to see what words you can change! The weapons are as follows:

Name: Word Sword                                                                                                                                                                                           How to use: Prefix S to the beginning of the word.                                                                                                                                           Example: “Craps” becomes “scraps”.

Name: Blue Shift                                                                                                                                                                                                        How to use: Shift all “colors” (ROYGBIV) one space in the direction of violet on the spectrum.                                                               Example: “Bio” becomes “ivy”.

Name: DNA Destroyer                                                                                                                                                                                            How to use: Remove all DNA bases (ACGT).                                                                                                                                               Example: “Stagecraft” becomes “serf”.

Name: Telegraph Switch                                                                                                                                                                                         How to use: In Morse code, replace dots with dashes and vice versa.                                                                                                   Example: “Minus” (– .. -. ..- …) becomes “imago” (.. — .- –. —).

Name: Odds Finder                                                                                                                                                                                                  How to use: Extract only the letters in odd position in the word.                                                                                                                  Example: “Blackberry” becomes “baker”.

Name: Alpha Decay                                                                                                                                                                                                  How to use: Reduce the atomic number of all chemical symbols by 2.                                                                                                          Example: “Bebop” (BeBOP) becomes “Helical” (HeLiCAl).

Which words have you defeated? Let me know in the comments!

Check out Andrew Huang, a multi-genre artist that challenges himself to make songs that have some crazy stipulations, like making a song that doesn’t have the letter “e”, making a rap that switches between five languages, or even making a song that goes alphabetically through 26 genres of music! Check out these songs and comment if you know another song with unusual rules, or even tried making one yourself!

Challenge: Make a song that transitions through 26 different genres, in alphabetical order.

Challenge: Cover “99 Red Balloons” using red balloons.

Challenge: Write a rap song that switches between five languages.

Check out this awesome app called SCVNGR. It’ll allow you to have adventures in real life, discover new places, and maybe even make a few friends along the way! You can check into places you go to (similar to Foursquare), but can also try neat challenges created by the SCVNGR community! Check out the website here.