Author: Lisa Mungovan

Did you know it’s Curious Events Day? Celebrate all the strange things in the world, like how it’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open, or historical events, like when meat fell from the sky in Kentucky. It’s also World Post Day, so send someone a postcard or letter. Don’t forget an interesting stamp!

Every year, Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska has a “fattest bear” competition. This year, the public voted for 480 Otis. This is the 4th time the “portly patriarch of paunch”, has won the title. Otis has a few more weeks to stuff himself, before the brown bears start to hibernate.

Belgian mathematician Valery Vermeulen is also a musician. He has created electronic music, from the gravitational waves of black holes. The project, called Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001, used data from the Voyager Satellite, floating 14,000,000,000 miles from Earth. Valery also used radiation readings from white dwarfs and neutron stars, to create his data sonification.

Archaeologists discovered a 2700-year-old toilet, inside an ancient settlement in Jerusalem. The toilet is a block of limestone, with a hole carved in the middle, placed over a septic tank. At that time, only very rich people, would have had toilets. This one probably belonged to one of the kings of the Judean Kingdom.

Did you know it’s World Egg Day? Ostrich eggs are so big, that one weighed nearly 6 pounds! A vervain hummingbird’s tiny eggs are only 10 mm long. Snake eggs are leathery, while frog eggs are clear and look like jelly. Even some mammals lay eggs, like duck-billed platypuses and echidnas. Eggs are egg-citing!

Today is World Octopus Day! Octopuses have 3 hearts, and 8 arms, not tentacles. Tentacles only have suckers at the tips. Octopuses are extremely intelligent, masters of camouflage, and escape artists! Today is also Touch Tag Day. An octopus would be great at water tag! My favorite version is freeze tag. Tag, you’re it!

People often put things by the curb, with a free sign. It’s an easy way to give stuff away, to anyone passing by. But in Wisconsin, someone left their boat, with “FREE” painted on the side, along the edge of a highway. Maybe it fell off someone’s trailer, and they’d simply had enough!

Electric cars have to charge up their batteries, which takes a lot longer than filling up a gas tank. But vehicle chargers are getting faster than ever. The Terra 360 charger, can fully charge 4 cars at once, in only 15 minutes. I wonder if I could plug my phone in for a minute.

Mosquitoes transmit a disease called malaria, which kills around 400,000 people per year, mostly in Africa. For the first time, scientists have developed an effective malaria vaccine. They have been working on malaria vaccines for 30 years, so they’re excited to finally see some success! It will save thousands of lives.