April Fool’s Day dates to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar.
Europe had followed the Julian calendar, first instituted by Roman emperor Julius Caesar in 46 B.C., in which the new year began with the spring equinox around April 1.
However, many people didn’t get the memo, (or at that time, the pigeon post) when Pope Gregory XIII introduced his Gregorian calendar in 1582. Those people continued to celebrate the new year on April 1, becoming the butt of jokes and earning the ignominious title of “April fools,” according to Deutsche Welle.
In all seriousness, the news media has taken to steering away from April Fool’s jokes and strange headlines on All Fool’s Day simply because “fake news” has been proliferating. Check out this video from the BBC 10 years ago:
Today, with news going viral via social media, there’s the risk of jokes being mistaken for fact and making global headlines, only to later backfire on a media already accused of proliferating fake news
Viewing four-leaf clovers from space
This journalist regularly gets email updates from news sites and space agencies, like NASA, JAX, and the European Space Agency (ESA). So I was not very surprised to see an email from the ESA saying they had detected a four-leaf clover from space.
The opening paragraph read: “ESA is excited to announce a revolutionary new technology that could bring luck to people all over the world: four-leaf clover detection from space.”
I immediately thought of an image from possibly the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes and was a bit disappointed to see a picture of what I thought was a cloverleaf on a highway someplace or another.
The picture was allegedly supposed to be of the island of Amadan in the Atlantic Ocean, which hosts the largest field of four-leaf clovers in the world. The team went on to say they had an 83 percent successful detection rate, confirmed by in situ measurements.
The project, named LCP⁴ (Lucky Clover Project quadrupled), utilizes state-of-the-art satellite technology combined with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing to create a new breakthrough algorithm able to detect four-leaf clovers from space.
Irma Onlyavenu, a graduate trainee in the LCP⁴ team, said, “It is quite exciting to be working on other lucky symbol detection including horseshoes, ladybirds, gatherings of black cats, and pots of gold at the ends of rainbows.”
The ESA story was extremely well done and I must say it had me fooled for a while. {Ok, I was fooled almost to the end).
The ESA wrote a disclaimer at the end of the article: Please note this is an April Fool’s Day joke. The technology mentioned above is not real and any similarities to actual technology is purely coincidental. For real technology updates and scientific facts, visit Earth observation.
