Today I Learned . . .

1. The element Scandium was predicted to exist by Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table. He dubbed the element ekaboron, with an atomic mass between 40 and 48 in 1869. Lars Fredrik Nilson and his team detected this element in the minerals euxenite and gadolinite. Nilson prepared 2 grams of scandium oxide of high purity. He named the element scandium, from the Latin Scandia meaning "Scandinavia". Nilson was apparently unaware of Mendeleev's prediction, but Per Teodor Cleve recognized the correspondence and notified Mendeleev.

2. The 2012 Major League Baseball season will begin on March 28 with the first of a two game series between the Seattle Mariners and the Oakland Athletics at the Tokyo Dome in Japan. The stateside portion of the regular season will start April 4 in Miami, Florida, with the opening of the new Marlins Park, as the newly renamed Miami Marlins host the defending World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals.

3. Google now has games