Author: Lisa Mungovan

Our planet has earthquakes, but Mars has marsquakes. NASA’s InSight lander detected 2 marsquakes last month, near the Red Planet’s equator, in the Cerberus Fossae region. Most of the earthquakes on our planet are caused by shifts in the tectonic plates, but Mars doesn’t have plates. Its quakes are caused by volcanic activity.

Today is World Table Tennis Day. It’s a lot easier to fit a ping-pong table in your house, than a tennis court. Table tennis began as a parlour game in Victorian England, and became an Olympic Sport in 19 88. If you don’t have a ping-pong table in your house, use your dining room table instead!

Yum-yummy-yum, today is Caramel Popcorn Day! The salty-sweet treat has been around since the 18-hundreds. It’s Teflon Day too. If you make your own caramel corn, you’ll be thanking Roy Plunket for inventing Teflon, or polytetraflouroethylene, and Marion Trozzolo for the Happy Pan. Teflon is the non-stick coating that makes cookware easy to clean!

Some poor kid was trying to get a little extra sleep on the bus before school, when a deer interrupted his nap. The deer crashed through the windshield, and landed right on the sleeping student. The bus driver opened the door, to let the deer out. No one was hurt.

Chewing gum didn’t always taste so good. Scientists studied a 5,700 year-old lump of tree-pitch, which was chewed by a Stone Age woman. They were able to extract DNA from the Paleolithic gum, to find out she had dark skin and hair, and blue eyes. They also know she was lactose-intolerant, and preferred wild food.

The first helicopter on Mars, is getting ready for its first flight. NASA’s Ingenuity drone was hanging out on the belly of the Perseverance rover, which arrived on Mars in February, but has now successfully dropped, to the surface of the Red Planet. The helicopter’s first flight could happen April 11th.

Using a map app on your phone is handy. It tells you exactly where to turn. But today, on Read A Road Map Day, unfold a paper map, to get a bigger picture and see exactly where everything is. Use it to find a pizza place, for Deep Dish Pizza Day.

In the Star Trek Universe in 2063, Zefram Cochrane took his first flight at speeds faster than Warp 1, in the Phoenix. It alerted the Vulcans of Earth’s entrance into the interstellar community. Today is Star Trek First Contact Day. Watch some episodes of Star Trek, learn a little Klingon, and live long and prosper!

Kids lose their baby teeth all the time, but they’re usually pretty small. 8-year-old Luke Boulton’s tooth had to be pulled, and was an astounding 1.02 inches long! His sister Leah, said it might be the longest baby tooth in the world, and she was right. I wonder if the Tooth Fairy is jealous!

A few years ago, divers near Norway discovered a 3-foot-wide gelatinous blob, suspended underwater. Similar unexplained blobs had been seen before around Norway, and also in the Mediterranean Sea. Scientists have finally identified the bubbles as egg sacs of the Illex coindetii squid. The mucus-filled spheres hold hundreds of thousands of squid eggs!