It’s been a rough two-and-a-half weeks, but the government is back. How do we know? Twitter. We told you how the government signed off, so here’s your guide to how they welcomed themselves back to the information-starved masses. 

The zoo and the Smithsonian returned with a flurry of tweets. Smithsonian museums are open today, the zoo will reopen tomorrow.

In the meantime, you can catch all the animal cams and pretend like you’re there. Yes, at 10:30 am, we finally got the news we’d all been waiting for: The panda cam is back in action, so you can watch little I-still-don’t-have-a-name wander around her cage. In case you were wondering, she grew roughly two pounds during the shut down, so they were likely feeding her the good stuff, not bargain-bin bamboo. The return of the panda cam is great and all, but while we were in government slim down mode, we were also missing out on the research, news, and earthquake safety tips federal agencies’ social media accounts often provide.

Joe Biden visited the Environmental Protection Agency and apparently may have baked some muffins (!?) for the employees. EPA administrator Gina McCarthy was also out greeting employees back to work.

Over at NASA, Curiosity was roving again.

Some agencies kept things all business, letting us know the government was back, and operations would resume as normal.

Research scheduled to be published during the shutdown went ahead as scheduled in private science journals, but press releases and announcements to go along with them were held back. NASA’s Earth science division let us know that Antarctica’s sea ice reached a new maximum at the end of last month, while the Smithsonian told us that mosquitos were jerks long before we were around to call them jerks.

NASA’s generally-excellent Twitter feed came back up with a photo of the Northern Lights from astronaut Mike Hopkins, one of the few NASA employees who wasn’t furloughed (it’s inconvenient to come back from space just because some politicians can’t agree). The agency then thanked the public for the sorta popular #thingsnasamighttweet hashtag, which kept people informed about goings-on in space while the agency was essentially crippled.

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The National Parks Service welcomed us back with this photo of the Grand Canyon:

For the National Science Foundation, it was business as usual: No mention of the shutdown, just a reminder to get your act together if you plan on helping to operate the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. And good thing, too. The initial deadline is tomorrow.

There was a salmonella outbreak while the CDC was shut down, but they were more worried about helping protect you from an earthquake. The USGS mostly shut down its Earthquake Hazards Program during the shutdown, but getting the info out to the public was significantly delayed.

Most government agencies were operating with a barebones staff during the shutdown, but it looks like things are quickly getting back to normal. Despite the fact lots of them could be replaced with robots, it’s good to have them back.