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Learn more about Matty Johnson and get to know the person behind the posts you have read.
Matty is a Running Start student and has been at Highline College since fall 2025. He started writing for the Thunderword in his second quarter, around a year ago. Outside of school, Matty enjoys reading, gaming, board games, and playing DnD. He plans to get his AA-DTA at the same time he graduates high school (in the Spring of 2027), and later transfer over to a four year university.
Matty Johnson's Recent Posts:
Bob Ferguson, the governor of Washington, has recently confirmed his plan to ban cellphones across schools in Washington state. His plan would go into effect in September 2027, if approved.
Life on Earth is something we take for granted every day. However, billions of years ago, Earth wasn’t the bright and welcoming planet we are familiar with. With oxygen levels dramatically shifting over the course of an eon, scientists decided to investigate how early life may have survived.
Today, the Earth’s atmosphere is composed of about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen (1% consisting of other trace gasses like carbon dioxide). However, from the Archean Eon to the very beginning of Proterozoic Eon, Earth had little to no oxygen (in gaseous form) within its atmosphere.
A recent blood Moon in the Pacific Northwest attracted 3 million people to bear witness to the total lunar eclipse. Worldwide, nearly 3 billion people were able to see it.
The blood Moon began at around midnight on March 3, for us here on the Pacific Coast. Three hours later, at around 3 a.m. P.S.T., the blood Moon reached its totality – its entire surface covered by a deep red. This effect lasted for about an hour.
You read that right. The Moon, as we know it, is shrinking. And this isn’t from a “Despicable Me” movie where Gru is shrinking the moon. The Moon is shrinking, in real life. It isn’t really anything to be worried about, though.
The Moon has only shrunk about 50 meters (164 feet) over the course of several hundred million years. Given that the Moon’s diameter is 11,400,048 feet long, (2,159.1 miles), its width has been reduced by approximately 0.00144%.
The Moon shrinking does actually cause a few things, though.
Cavendish banana plants are being assaulted by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense worldwide, causing them to wilt and die. Fortunately, in this time of crisis, scientists may have just found something that could save bananas for generations to come.
“Fusarium wilt – also known as Panama disease – is a destructive soil-borne disease which impacts farmed Cavendish bananas worldwide through its virulent Race 4 strains,” said Dr. Andrew Chen, a researcher at The University of Queensland.
Spider silk has always been known to be one of the strongest organic materials. Fortunately, scientists have found out why. Tiny, yet complicated chemical attractions allow spider silk to remain flexible while still being extremely strong.
The strongest spider silk is spider dragline silk. It forms the frame of the spiderweb, and needs to be able to hold the weight of the spider. It is stronger than steel (by weight), and tougher than Kevlar (a material used in the making of bulletproof vests).
A few months ago, scientists investigated a cave in northern Germany. Inside, a hidden infrared camera captured something strange: A rat hiding in a corner jumped at an unsuspecting bat, jumping out of the shadows before swiftly dispatching it. With bat populations already low, scientists jumped in to research the threat. Rats had never been known to hunt bats, so this encounter bewildered scientists.
The rats were identified as brown rats (Rattus norvegicus), one of the world’s most common and invasive predators. The research team turned to other bat caves around the area to see if they could get similar findings like the one shown on the infrared camera.
If you tried to go to a national park on Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) day this year, you probably were in for a rude awakening. Where national parks usually provide free admission on both MLK day and Juneteenth, the Trump administration decided to remove both of these days, replacing it with Flag Day – which happens to be Trump’s birthday.
Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said, “Removing MLK Day and Juneteenth from the national parks calendar is more than petty politics – it’s an attack on the truth of this nation’s history.”
Recently scientists have pondered if lakes on ancient Mars could have stayed liquid for years. As new research suggests, there is a chance only the top layer of the lakes could have frozen over, acting as insulation to prevent the rest of the water from freezing.
‘Ancient Mars’ refers to the early, geological history of the red planet, in which it was once teeming with water, and covered with ocean billions of years ago. Now, the planet is pockmarked with lake basins and structures resembling ancient river systems.