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Do you know what CRISPR is? It’s not how you like your potato chips! It’s an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which is a family of DNA sequences in bacteria. Scientists just used CRISPR to turn E-coli bacteria into miniature tape recorders! This method of recording information is a new way to use bacteria to diagnose diseases!
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30 new species have been discovered in the Amazon. The Kaieteur National Park in Guyana is home to six new species of fish, three new plants, fifteen new aquatic beetles, five new odonates (which are like dragonflies and damselflies), and one big spider. A blue tarantula! At least he will be easy to spot!
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Giving Tuesday is a good time to tell you about ways kids have raised money for charity. 8 year-olds Max Chwatko and Alex Travis started charging a nickel a joke to raise money for cancer research and have raised $30,000! But the Comedy Kids can’t top Charlie Simpson. The 7 year-old raised $240,000 for Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 by riding his bike 5 miles!
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Yesterday people spent over 6 billion dollars shopping online on Cyber Monday. Today is the day to give something back! It’s Giving Tuesday, named in 2012 when two organizations wanted to designate one day for global charity. Last year generous people around the world donated more than 168 million dollars to help others!
Mad Mike Hughes is a Flat-Earther. He was scheduled to launch himself in a homemade rocket but the government said he could not use their land. He wants to prove that the Earth is flat by photographing it from 1800 feet in the air. The rest of us have known that the Earth is round for about 25,000 years!
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Turtles that live in ponds hibernate underwater. But they have lungs, so how can they breathe when the pond freezes? They get oxygen from the water as it passes over parts of the body that have the most blood vessels. Like the turtle’s butt! This is called cloacal respiration but it’s more fun to call it butt breathing.
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First comes Thanksgiving, then Black Friday. Well, today is Cyber Monday. It first started back in 2005, when people went back to work after the Thanksgiving holiday and shopped online using their fast internet connections. It’s the best day to buy gifts online because there are lots of special discounts. Did I tell you how much I love hats?
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Scientists have spotted the first ever interstellar asteroid. It is traveling through our solar system at 200,000 miles per hour, but it came from another solar system. The asteroid is a dark red rock shaped like a 400 meter cigar. That’s 15,748 inches long! It was first detected by a telescope in Hawaii so they named it the Hawaiian word for a messenger from afar arriving first, ‘Oumuamua.
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Do you think you could design a tool that would be useful in space? Students can use free 3D design software to create a new combination tool from two tools already being used on the International Space Station. The best design will be 3D printed in space! Look for the Two for the Crew Challenge on NASA.gov and submit your idea before December 19th! Maybe you’ll grow up to be an astronaut and get to use your own invention!
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Many birds migrate south for the winter. Late November is a good time to see lots of waterfowl like ducks and geese flying overhead in their distinctive V formation which helps them conserve energy. Check the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s BirdCast to see who is migrating near you.
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