Author: Lisa Mungovan

The stores are full of Halloween candy, but you don’t have to wait until Halloween to satisfy your sweet tooth. Today is Sweetest Day! Created by a candy company in 1921, it inspired people to give out boxes of candy, and make it the sweetest day of the year! Have a sweet day!

Today is Bridge Day, but it’s not really about bridges. It’s about BASE jumpers, the people who jump off of them for fun using parachutes or wingsuits! BASE stands for Buildings, Antennas, Spans, (like bridges), and Earth, (like cliffs). It’s also I Love Yarn Day, if knitting is more your style!

Someone will get to celebrate the Barbie doll’s 60th birthday at the ultimate location: a real-life Malibu Barbie Dreamhouse! The California house has a hot pink water slide, a pink jeep, and a closet full of Barbie-inspired clothes. It’s $60 to stay there, through Air BnB. Booking opens on October 23 for one lucky person!

Today will mark the first all-female spacewalk at the International Space Station. Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will be working outside the station for more than 5 hours, fixing a broken power controller. The historic milestone should have taken place in March, with astronaut Anne McClain, but they didn’t have enough spacesuits that fit!

Even though you wash your hands in a public bathroom, you have to exit by touching a dirty handle. 2 students at the University of Hong Kong won the Dyson Award, for designing a door handle that cleans itself. It uses titanium dioxide powder and ultraviolet lights to kill bacteria, every time the door opens!

11 year-old Jonah Larson, is a master of crocheting. He taught himself to crochet at age 5! By selling his work on Instagram, he’s raising money for a library at an Ethiopian orphanage, where he lived before he was adopted. You can watch his series, “Learn to Crochet with Jonah,” and pick up a new skill!

If you see some of your favorite bearded people looking less hairy today, it might be because it’s No Beard Day. Imagine Gandalf, Hagrid, or Santa Claus without beards! At least they wouldn’t get chocolatey beards, for Chocolate Cupcake Day! Do you bite into a cupcake, or lick the frosting off first?

Students in California will be able to sleep in later, after a new law goes into effect. Public high schools won’t be allowed to start before 8:30 in the morning. Later schedules help improve test scores, decrease car crashes, and reduce absences and tardies. Schools have until 2022 to adjust their schedules, so just be patient!

Katie Van Blaricum volunteers at a zoo, so she has experience helping animals. She even saved the life of a butterfly, by giving it a wing transplant! A monarch had a torn wing, so she cut off the broken piece, and glued on a wing from a dead butterfly. The new wing worked great!

Celebrate National Pasta Day with this fun fact: Kevin Cole holds the record for the Longest Spaghetti Nasal Ejection. He put a strand of spaghetti in his mouth, then blew it out his nostril  7 1/2 inches! He can also suck spaghetti in one nostril and pull it out the other, to floss his nose.