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Welcome to the Kotky Ride Home for Monday, January 31st, 2022. I'm Jackson Bird today.

The Lost History of Moon Trees. Not quite as exciting as it sounds, but still really cool.

Plus, the lineup of new emojis that just dropped on iOS 15.4, as well as a new study showing

how emoji use can be an early detector of remote work burnout. And Moderna's HIV vaccine has

entered human trials. Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

51 years ago, today, the crew of Apollo 14 launched into space aboard the Saturn 5 from the

Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In addition to Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, and Stuart Rusza

in the command module, there were also about 500 stowaways.

The stowaways never made it to the moon. They stayed in lunar orbit with Rusa, while Mitchell and Shepard collected rocks and played golf on the surface of the moon.

Those stowaways were seeds, five different species of tree seeds, which would later be germinated on Earth and planted across the United States,

some at bicentennial celebrations a few years later. And there was a lot of buzz around those seedlings at the time, but within a few years, most people seem to have forgotten about them, including

a lot of the folks at NASA, even those who were there during the Apollo program.

When David Williams, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland,

got an email from a third grade teacher in Indiana asking about a so-called moon tree, neither he nor anyone in his

office knew what she was talking about. That was 1996, and the teacher, Joan Goebel, had been

tipped off about a tree by a student when the whole class was working on a project about trees in

general. The Sycamore in question, which stood at a

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