The cherry blossoms are finally in bloom in Washington, D.C., and what better way to celebrate these beautiful Japanese gifts than with a haiku? Our callout on Facebook and Twitter yielded hundreds of spring haiku submissions. With the help of Ellen Compton, Roberta Beary and Kristen Deming of the Haiku Society of America, we selected 20 and made videos inspired by the top three.

Short And Sweet: Celebrating D.C.’s Cherry Blossoms With Haiku

Photo Credit: Lizzie Chen/NPR

Click through to see our interns’ lovely videos inspired by haiku. Great work by Gabriella Demczuk, Marie McGrory and Lizzie Chen!

keithwj:

Patterns-Recognized

How Stereotypes Can Drive Women To Quit Science

By “sampling” people’s daily lives, Mehl said his recorder often picks up on things that people don’t notice. Most of us remember only the highlights of our days — an interesting conversation or a ballgame. But much of the time, our lives run on autopilot, and we don’t notice what’s going on. Mehl said getting detailed information about what people do during the majority of their time is central to understanding them psychologically.

The sampling technique has revealed flaws in common stereotypes. Take the one about how women like to talk much more than men. When Mehl actually measured how many words men and women speak each day, he found there was practically no difference — both men and women speak around 17,000 words a day, give or take a few hundred. - Shankar Vedantam, NPR

This is a photo-based tumblr, but I just wanted to highlight this cool illustration by the Science Desk’s intern, Ayodhya Ouditt. He is studying industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design and we can’t wait to see what else he has up his sleeve. To learn more about NPR’s awesome interns, check out their tumblr. -Emily