Top Five Twitter Posts: Space Shuttle Flyover, 'Chutes and Ladders' and One Local Cop's Incredible Recovery

Between a supplier "matchmaker" event at the Chrysler building in Chicago and a Motion Industries vendor expo on the outskirts of Detroit, we've had a pretty productive week getting out there and meeting new people in various industries. But we'e also met a bunch of new people online — new followers of @BWCnews, where we keep an always-active online presence. It's one of the easiest ways to find us, engage with us and just stay on top of interesting industry news ... or whatever else catches our fancy. We'd love to hear from you — and maybe one of your tweets will end up in our Twitter Friday feature someday. Keep checking!

Credit: NBC Bay Area

1. Space Shuttle 'Endeavor' Flies Over Bay Area via NASA Ames Research Center: This NASA research center is about a 45-minute drive from our East Bay Area headquarters, so we didn't see the aircraft with the naked eye, but thankfully the good people of NASA made sure the whole world got to watch the historic flyover through a live online video stream. Plus, they kept us in the loop with a flood of tweets and Facebook picture posts. Way to tune us all in to the fascinating spectacle, NASA!

2. Amazing Recovery for Wounded Fremont Cop on SFgate.com: This inspiring story tells us of the incredible, unlikely recovery of a Bay Area officer who got shot on the job. Through sheer tenacity, he recovered. This is an amazing testament to the idea of "Motion Without Limits!"

Credit: Rodney Miller

3. Chutes and Ladders — a Primer for Entrepreneurism? on PamelaKan.Blogspot.com: How do you find opportunity in failure? Bishop-Wisecarver President poses that question in her latest blog, which touts the importance of the motto: "Try again, fail again, fail better, fail faster."

4. New MakerBot Replicator Might Just Change Your World on Wired.com: There's a bit of technological magic that's taking the world by storm ... it's a printer that allows you to design anything in your CAD software then print it into a reality as easily as it is to print a photo. Wired has a good little feature on the 3-D printing breakthrough that all the cool kids were buzzing about this week. Awesome stuff.

5. Meet Baxter, a Robot with Common Sense on Mashable Tech: Consider this little guy like the most reliable employee. It's a new type of android that uses "common sense" in the manufacturing work space, according to this story, which includes a nifty little video to demonstrate the concept. What that means, basically, is that the robot can be trained like a human to multitask, can learn a new task in about 30 minutes and works safely alongside people. The article also says the technology is relatively affordable, so manufacturers that otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford artificial intelligence like this can now have access to it. Fascinating!