Author: Lisa Mungovan

Look up in the sky this week, and you’ll have a good chance of spotting a shooting star. As Earth passes through a comet’s debris field, bits of rock burn up in the atmosphere, causing meteor showers. The Lyrid meteor showers will be clearest, looking east in a pre-dawn sky.

NASA announced that SpaceX was chosen, for the Artemis mission taking astronauts back to the Moon. The reusable Starship spacecraft, will carry crew members to the lunar surface, where they’ll spend a week. The trip is still a few years away. Humans have not landed on the Moon since 1972, during the Apollo program.

Today is Pet Owners Independence Day. On this wacky holiday, people are supposed to switch places with their pets. You can lay around and get fed, while your pet goes to work or school, and scoops up your poop. Also, eat animal crackers, for Animal Crackers Day. Maybe your pets should eat people crackers!

A boy in Ireland must have given a soccer ball a mighty kick, because it ended up across the Irish Sea, in Wales. Summer Rickard found the ball washed up on shore in Tywyn. The ball had an Irish address on it, and by posting photos on Facebook, the owner was located 6 hours later!

A new pterosaur was discovered, that had opposable thumbs. It flew among the trees, and used its handy thumbs to help it climb. Researchers named it Kunpengopterus antipollicatus, but you can just call it Monkeydactyl. The small reptile lived during the Jurassic period, over 145,000,000 years ago, and is the only known pterosaur with thumbs.

I’ve gotta crawfish for sale here who’ll give me 1 dollar 1-dolla 1 dolla 1 here now gimme 2 2 2 dolla-two, sold, for $2. It’s Auctioneers Day! Talk like an auctioneer and sell something to your friends. I pretended to auction a crawdad, because it’s also Crawfish Day! They look like little lobsters, but they live in creeks.

Bats are amazing creatures. One colony of Mexican Free-Tailed bats eats up to 30,000 pounds of insects each night, including lots of annoying mosquitoes! Other types of bats eat fruit, like the giant golden-crowned flying fox. It has a wingspan of 5 1/2 feet! Bats are also pollinators, like bees and butterflies. Happy International Bat Appreciation Day!

Cheeseballs taste like cheese.

But kickballs don’t taste like kick.

Blah blah blah blah blah.

How did you like my haiku poem? Write your own 3-line poem, using 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables, for Haiku Poetry Day. Today is also Blah Blah Blah Day, Cheeseball Day, and Kickball Day. Blab on and on about nothing!

When archaeologist Marie Woods went to the coast in Yorkshire England, she was only looking for some shellfish for dinner. Instead, she found a massive 165,000,000-year-old dinosaur footprint. The print was most likely made by a megalosaurus from the Jurassic period. The meat-eating theropod track, is the largest ever found in Yorkshire.

Researchers have developed a new paint, that reflects over 98% of all light. If a roof was covered with the paint, it would cool the house down as much as a central air conditioner. The paint contains barium sulfate, which scatters light. Even in full sunlight, painted surfaces stay cooler than the surrounding air.