Ingenuity

NASA’s newest space telescope was recently launched into the atmosphere, and Illinois had a part to play in making that happen.

One of the scientists involved in building the telescope was an Urbana native, giving Illinois an interesting connection to the new space exploration tool.

TIME Magazine recently released its inaugural ranking of the top 80 startup incubators and accelerators in the United States, which included The Garage at Northwestern University.

The Garage was ranked No. 5 on TIME Magazine’s list, behind New York’s TechStars, Massachusetts’ MassChallenge, Florida’s Tampa Bay Wave and California’s Y Combinator. The list included six organizations that are headquartered in Illinois, with The Garage being the highest-ranked of them. The other Illinois-headquartered organizations that were included on TIME Magazine’s list are The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (No. 7), mHUB (No. 14), the University of Illinois Research Park (No. 27), MATTER (No. 61) and 1871 (No. 63).

If someone said that only one U.S. president has a patent and asked you to guess which one it was, who would you say? Thomas Jefferson? Theodore Roosevelt? No, the answer is Abraham Lincoln.

With all of Lincoln’s other accomplishments, it is understandable that his patent flies under the radar, especially because it was before he became president. But it is no less impressive.

Midway Village Museum in Rockford is hosting its 21st Sock Monkey Madness, which will include a Make-a-Monkey Workshop, sock monkey-themed crafts and games, and tours of The Missing Link Sock Monkey History Exhibit. Don’t worry if your sock monkey needs repair: the Sockford General Hospital can fix it up for you.

Believe it or not, the sock monkey’s creation can be traced to Rockford. John Nelson, a Swedish immigrant, patented an automatic knitting machine in 1868 that could mass-produce socks, which had not been done before. He then started the Nelson Knitting Company in 1880 and introduced “Nelson Socks,” which were brown socks and also called “Celebrated Rockford Hosiery.”

Pasqal, a global leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, will establish their U.S. headquarters as a future tenant of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park on Chicago’s South Side.

Located at a historic and scenic site on Lake Michigan just minutes away from downtown Chicago, the IQMP offers direct access to universities, national labs and transportation for local, national and global connectivity. The multibillion-dollar, 128-acre public-private IQMP will include shared cryogenic facilities, equipment labs and research spaces. Tenants include quantum computing company PsiQuantum and the DARPA-Illinois Quantum Proving Ground and will ultimately become a full ecosystem of companies, researchers, suppliers, end users and other partners. It will be managed by an organization affiliated with the University of Illinois system.