Final Four Men's NCAA College Basketball Tournament in Arlington, Texas:  UConn vs. Florida Saturday, April 5, and later that day Kentucky vs. Wisconsin. Link to live score results and printable brackets at  http://news.lalate.com/2014/03/31/final-four-bracket-2014-schedule-set-uconn-vs-florida-kentucky-vs-wisconsin/   See on TBS.  Championship game on April 7.

Final Four Women's NCAA College Basketball Tournament in Nashville, Tennessee:  

Maryland vs. Notre Dame 5:30 p.m. Sunday, April 6  and later that day UConn vs. Stanford  Find more information at http://www.tennessean.com/story/sports/college/2014/04/01/maryland-stanford-join-uconn-notre-dame-final-four/7190119/   See on ESPN.  Championship game on April 8.

National Library Week will be observed April 13-19, 2014 with the theme, "Lives change @ your library®."  First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.  It is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support.  All types of libraries - school, public, academic and special - participate.  http://www.ala.org/news/mediapresscenter/factsheets/nationallibraryweek  Check your local library for activities during National Library Week.

Amber has enthralled Europeans, and especially Russians, for centuries because of the golden, jewel-encrusted Amber Room, which was made of several tons of the gemstone.  A gift to Peter the Great in 1716 celebrating peace between Russia and Prussia, the room's fate became anything but peaceful:  Nazis looted it during World War II, and in the final months of the war, the amber panels, which had been packed away in crates, disappeared.  A replica was completed in 2003, but the contents of the original, dubbed "the Eighth Wonder of the World," have remained missing for decades.   Construction of the Amber Room began in 1701. It was originally installed at Charlottenburg Palace, home of Friedrich I, the first King of Prussia.  Truly an international collaboration, the room was designed by German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter and constructed by the Danish amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram. Peter the Great admired the room on a visit, and in 1716 the King of Prussia—then Frederick William I—presented it to the Peter as a gift, cementing a Prussian-Russian alliance against Sweden.  The Amber Room was shipped to Russia in 18 large boxes and installed in the Winter House in St. Petersburg as a part of a European art collection.  In 1755, Czarina Elizabeth ordered the room to be moved to the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, named Tsarskoye Selo, or "Czar's Village."  Italian designer Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli redesigned the room to fit into its new, larger space using additional amber shipped from Berlin.  After other 18th-century renovations, the room covered about 180 square feet and glowed with six tons of amber and other semi-precious stones.  The amber panels were backed with gold leaf.  Jess Blumberg   http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-amber-room-160940121/?no-ist

Incredibly, the amber panels survived 170 years and the Bolshevik Revolution intact.  Restorations were done in 1760, 1810, 1830, 1870, 1918, 1935, and 1938.  An extensive restoration was planned in the 1940s, but on June 22, 1941 German troops invaded the Soviet Union.  In the days before its capture, museum officials hastily shipped all of the small objects in the Amber Room to eastern Russia.  But the panels themselves proved impossible to remove. In an effort to conceal them, a layer of wallpaper was slapped over, but the disguise fooled no one.  Hitler ordered the Amber Room returned to Königsberg which, in his mind, was where it rightly belonged, since a Prussian king had first conceived the idea.  Six men took thirty-six hours to dismantle the panels and meticulously packed the twenty tons of amber in crates, which were shipped west by truck convoy and rail, eventually re-installed in the Königsberg castle along with a vast collection of Prussian art.  The first Allied bombardment of Königsberg occurred in August 1944.  Some of the mirrored pilasters and a few of the smaller amber panels were damaged.  Between January and April 1945, the Soviet Army steadily approached Königsberg. The panels were then hidden.  The last German document that mentioned the Amber Room was dated January 12, 1945 and noted that the panels were being packed for transport to Saxony.  Trucks eventually left Königsberg on April 6, 1945 and were never seen again.  http://steveberry.org/books/the-amber-room/authors-note/

Amber is fossilized tree resin.  It has formed from resin that oozed out of the cracks in the bark of trees millions of years ago.  Resin protects plants; it has antibacterial properties and the sticky substance hinders insects gnawing or burrowing into bark.  Some trees can produce resin in such large quantities that it seeps out of cracks in the bark and runs down their trunks.  Resin first hardens into a substance called copal and chunks of copal get buried in soil and sediments.  Over millions of years the copal hardens into amber.  Any insects or other inclusions that were stuck in the resin are perfectly preserved.  Individual amber pieces often contain evidence about how they were formed.  They can contain pieces or impressions of bark, or many layers that built up by successive flows of resin.  Both copal and amber are light so can be carried by water far from where they originally formed.  Most of the world’s amber comes from the Baltic region of northern Europe, but amber is found all over the world.  http://www.nms.ac.uk/our_museums/national_museum/exhibitions/amazing_amber/what_is_amber.aspx

Amber is known to mineralogists as succinite, from the Latin succinum, which means amber. Rubbing amber with a cloth will make it electric, attracting bits of paper. The Greek name for amber is elektron, or the origin of our word electricity.  The modern name for amber is thought to come from the Arabic word, amber, meaning ambergris.  Ambergris is the waxy aromatic substance created in the intestines of sperm whales.  Ambergris and amber are only related by the fact that both wash up on beaches.  http://academic.emporia.edu/abersusa/amber.html

On March 30, 2014, London scientists who’d studied 25 skeletons discovered in a new rail line said everything we’d thought about the bubonic plague — what caused it, what kind of disease it was, its strength — was wrong.  Most of the ensuing coverage focused on the finding that the disease wasn’t likely spread by rats’ fleas, as has been taught in every high school in the West, but had actually been airborne.  The disease was pneumonic – not bubonic.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/31/everything-you-know-about-the-black-death-is-wrong-say-the-bones/?tid=hp_mm

March 30, 2014  In the purer, wide-eyed days of yore, April 1 marked a once-in-a-year-opportunity to print phenomenal whoppers in newspapers, tell your children penguins can fly and otherwise violate the everyday norms of human behavior.  But pranksters hardly need an annual indulgence for their hijinks anymore:  On the Internet, after all, every day is April Fools’ Day.  In the past week alone, online hoaxers convinced wide swaths of the online world that a deranged man dressed as a clown wandered unchecked around Staten Island; that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte casually biked to his meeting with Obama; that R&B singer Trey Songz was gay; and that searchers finally found Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 . . . about 15 times over.   Although it’s easy, and perhaps comfortable, to blame the deceivers, the reality is far more complicated.  The Web incentivizes page views, no matter how they’re racked up.  And so hoaxes are hatched not only by lone pranksters but also by Web-savvy marketers and public relations firms eager for attention.  They’re often propagated by journalists hungry for clicks and starved for time.  Then they’re swallowed whole by an audience drowning in so much information — such a cacophony of demands on their eyeballs and attention — that only the truly crazy stuff stands out.  Caitlin Dewey  http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/on-the-internet-every-day-is-april-fools-day/2014/03/30/97bdb5d2-b820-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html?tid=hpModule_d39b60e8-8691-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z10

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1130  April 2, 2014  On this date in 1800, Ludwig van Beethoven led the premiere of his First Symphony in Vienna.  In 1900, Congress passed the  Foraker Act, giving Puerto Rico limited self-rule.