No matter the weather, Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll always wore gloves which he frequently misplaced.
SCHOOLS OF THE AIR
If you lived in the Australian Outback between 1950 and 2005, you might have gone to school on the radio.
OUTBACK SCHOOL
In Australia, most of the people live along the coast. That’s because the country’s interior is mostly open desert and rocky rangeland. Only about 10 percent of Australia’s entire population lives in the dusty interior, which is known as the Outback.
The folks who do live there mostly work on sheep or cattle ranches. Their nearest neighbors can be 100 miles away, and roads are rutted dirt. It’s so isolated that, until 1950, kids who grew up in the Outback had to attend boarding school if they wanted to get an education—there weren’t enough people living out there to build schools. But in 1950, a woman named Adelaide Miethke came up with the idea of using airplanes and radios to link kids throughout the Outback with teachers in large towns.
THANK THE FLYING DOCTORS
In 1928, the Australian government set up an airplane ambulance service for people living in the Outback. Each home had a two-way radio that people could use to call for help in case of an emergency. A doctor would fly in on a small plane and either treat the victim right there or take him to a hospital in one of the cities. It was called the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
In Thailand, it’s considered rude to cross your legs in front of other people.
Adelaide Miethke worked for the service, and she began to wonder why the government couldn’t use the same technology to set up schools for kids living on the ranches. It took a few tries, but she presented a plan to the government, and in 1950, the first school opened in a town called Alice Springs. It was called the School of the Air.
HOW IT WORKED
Each teacher for the school had a small office in one of the Outback towns. The students sat in their own houses hundreds of miles away next to their radios. In the school’s early days, the teacher just presented a 3½-hour lesson and the kids listened—they had no way to talk to her. But eventually, the school got two-way radios and the kids could talk to the teacher and to each other.
At least once a year, teachers went on “patrol.” That meant they drove to each child’s home (no matter how far away it was) to meet the kids face-to-face and talk to their parents. The rest of the year, airplanes for the Royal Flying Doctor Service delivered mail, homework, and supplies to teachers and students.
No one’s sure: Wilma Flintstone’s maiden name was either Pebble or Slaghoopal.
OUTBACK SCHOOL TODAY
Alice Springs was just the first School of the Air. In all, 15 schools opened throughout the Australian Outback. Today, they’re a little different but serve basically the same needs. Kids stopped using radios in 2005, and they no longer send in their homework by airplane. Now they use e-mail and Web cams to communicate with their teachers. But teachers still do “patrol” visits, and today, about 1,000 students are enrolled in the program. Without the Schools of the Air, those kids would have to leave their families to get an education, or they might not be able to go to school at all.
Label on a Korean kitchen knife: “Warning: keep out of children.”
MYTH-CONCEPTIONS
A lot of the things you may have been told just aren’t true.
Myth: Monkeys and apes groom each other by picking off fleas and ticks, and then they eat them.
Truth: They’re not removing bugs, they’re removing dead skin. (But they do eat it.)
Myth: Ninjas wore all black.
Truth: When movies and TV shows started showing ninjas—secret agents in old Japan—they borrowed the details from 19th-century Japanese plays, which put ninjas in black clothing because it looked mysterious and dramatic onstage. In reality, ninjas wore dark blue at night to fade into the dark. During the day, they wore whatever clothes they needed to blend in with crowds.
Myth: Diamonds are the world’s most valuable gems.
Truth: Carat for carat (the measurement used to weigh gems), rubies are more valuable than diamonds.
Myth: An arm or limb “falls asleep” because its blood supply gets cut off.
Truth: The feeling of numbness happens when a major nerve is pinched against a hard object or bone. The pinch causes a temporary numb sensation, but the blood continues to flow normally.
Popular snack in Uganda: Nsenene—green grasshoppers fried in oil, with salt.
Myth: The Eskimo language has hundreds of different words for “snow.”
Truth: There is no single group of people called “Eskimos,” so there is no one “Eskimo language.” The term refers to dozens of different ethnic groups in northern North America, most of whom speak their own language. Each has its own word for “snow.”
Myth: Chameleons change color to blend into their environment.
Truth: Chameleons can change color, but it’s a reaction to fear, extreme temperature, or light changes. And different chameleons turn different colors; it does help them survive. But the change has nothing to do with matching their surroundings.
Myth: In the original fairy tale, Cinderella’s slippers were made of glass.
Truth: Actually, they were made of fur. The goof comes from a poor translation—someone interpreted the French word vair, which means “fox fur,” as verre, which means “glass.”
Big Beefhead, the Buffalo Hangman, His Accidency, and Uncle Jumbo were some of the nicknames given to President Grover Cleveland.
SWEAT 101
Everything you ever needed to know about sweat.
•People sweat to cool themselves off. As the sweat evaporates from your skin, it lowers your body’s temperature.
•On a hot summer day, most people sweat about three cups per hour.
•Ninety-nine percent of sweat is water; the rest is mostly potassium and salt
•Who sweats more—Olympic athletes or football players? Probably the Olympians, especially if they’re playing a sport that requires constant activity, like tennis or soccer. Competitors in men’s tennis produce about 14 cups of sweat per match. That beats the football players—even on a very hot day, they usually sweat less than five cups per game.
•Sweat stinks, right? Nope. It’s odorless. The bacteria that thrive in it are what smell.
•The human body contains as many as 4 million sweat glands. Your feet have the most, and your back has the least.
•Women have more sweat glands than men, but men’s glands are more active, which is why it often seems like men sweat more than women.
•Despite what many people think, dogs do have sweat glands, mostly on their paws. But they have far fewer than humans, so they also pant to cool themselves off.
•Two things cause your body to sweat: high heat and stress. Why? Stress makes your body think it’s under attack, so it produces a chemical called adrenaline to give you extra strength to fight back or run away. All that activity would raise your body’s temperature, so you sweat in anticipation of it. That worked well for our ancestors, who had to fight off wild animals and other real attacks. But in modern times, sweating is just a leftover evolutionary reaction…that usually stresses people out even more.
Southernmost capital on earth: Wellington, New Zealand
DUMB CROOKS
For these guys, crime really didn’t pay.
BUMP Oops:
In January 2009, 20-year-old Santiago Alonso was driving down a Massachusetts street when he hit another car. Frightened that he’d get in trouble, he immediately drove away. The problem? His car’s bumper had fallen off during the accident. Just a bumper wouldn’t have been so bad…but it also had the car’s license plate attached to it.
Gotcha! The police easily tracked Alonso down and arrested him for making an unsafe lane change and for fleeing the scene of an accident.
NO KIDDING
Oops: When Barry Kramer decided to rob a sporting-goods store in Utah in November 2008, he realized
he needed a weapon and a disguise. What did he choose? A 10-inch butcher knife and a pair of men’s underwear. He walked into the store with the underwear on his head and demanded that the clerk give him all the cash in the register. According to police reports, the clerk first said, “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” and then tried to wrestle the knife away from Kramer. The blade broke, so Kramer ran.
Gotcha! Outside the store, two customers tackled Kramer and sat on him until the police arrived.
It’s against the law to take photos of British police officers.
BEATING THE GROWN-UPS
These amazing young athletes took to the field against some of the world’s best…and won!
FREDDY ADU
This future soccer star immigrated to the United States from the African nation of Ghana in 1997, when he was eight. By then, Freddy had already been playing soccer for more than five years and was used to going up against much older players in his hometown. So when a coach in his Maryland neighborhood saw him play and asked him to join a team of boys a few years older than he was, Freddy signed up right away.
In 2003, Freddy became an American citizen, and the next year, a few months before he turned 15, he made his professional debut as a forward and midfielder for the D.C. United. He played with and scored goals against men several years older, and he was the youngest American athlete to join a professional team in more than 100 years. Freddy was also a star student: he got his high-school diploma when he was 15 years old, just a few months after becoming a Major League soccer player.
Ever have blueberry wojapi? It’s a kind of Sioux fruit pudding.
MARIA SHARAPOVA
In 1991, at the age of four, Maria started playing tennis in her hometown of Nyagan, Russia. By six, she was so good that she’d impressed the head coach of the Russian Tennis Federation. By seven, she’d moved to the United States to train at the Bollettieri Sports Academy in Bradenton, Florida, a school that had produced tennis stars like Andre Agassi and Monica Seles. At first, her father had to work several jobs to pay for her training. But just a few months after she got to Florida, Maria was such a tennis talent that she won a full scholarship to the academy.
For the next seven years, Maria competed in amateur matches, placing first in so many of them that she won tennis’s first “Rising Star Award.” In 2001, when she turned 14, she went pro and became the youngest person to reach the final at the Australian Open’s junior division. But her biggest success came in 2004, when she headed to Wimbledon. She made it all the way to the final (which no one expected the 17-year-old to do) and had to face Serena Williams, one of the best players in the world. But thanks to 100-mph serves and quick feet, Maria won the match—becoming the first Russian and the third-youngest person ever to win Wimbledon. (The two younger winners were Lottie Dodd, age 15, in 1887, and Martina Hingis, age 16, in 1997.)
Don’t let the name fool you: The koala bear is a marsupial, not a bear.
RYAN SHECKLER
This California kid started riding a skateboard when he was 18 months old. He wasn’t doing tricks back then, but he loved scooting around his driveway on one knee. By 1996, when he was just seven, Ryan had landed his first commercial sponsor (a local skate shop) and was winning amateur skateboarding contests. Then in 2003, he went pro…and at 13 won a gold medal at the Summer X Games, becoming the youngest person ever to do so. He’s taken first place in more than 15 professional competitions since, and even has his own MTV reality show, Life of Ryan. When a reporter asked him if he knew he’d be this successful, Ryan said, “I always thought it would happen, just not so soon!”
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WHY DOES ORANGE JUICE TASTE SO BAD AFTER I BRUSH MY TEETH?
Scientists aren’t sure, but they think it has to do with a chemical reaction that occurs when you put both things in your mouth. Sodium lauryl sulfate makes toothpaste sudsy, but it also suppresses your taste buds’ sweet receptors. Orange juice is contains both sweet and bitter flavors. So if you drink orange juice but have no working sweet receptors, all you taste is the bitter part.
The Peanuts comic strip was originally called Li’l Folks.
SMELLY SCIENCE
P-U! These facts sure do stink!
•Every person has a unique scent (the same way that everyone has a unique set of fingerprints). The exception: identical twins. They smell exactly the same—minus the perfume, soap, and shampoo, of course.
•On average, girls have a sharper sense of smell than boys do.
•Humans can discern between more than 10,000 different odors. Most of these pass in and out of your nose without your noticing. It’s only when a smell is particularly good or bad that your brain pays attention.
•Your sense of smell gets better throughout the day, and is sharpest in the evening.
•Some people have no sense of smell, a condition called anosmia.
•About 80 percent of taste is actually smell. That’s why food tastes so bland when you have a stuffy nose.
•People remember facts better when they attach a smell to the fact and then re-create the smell when they need to remember. So next time you’ve got a test, try using a certain soap when you study. Then use the same soap on test day. You should have an easier time remembering the answers.
November 19 is World Toilet Day.
THE TRUTH ABOUT SEA MONSTERS
Lurking in the ocean is an enormous sea monster that, according to myth, likes to eat fishing boats and fishermen. Is it just a legend…or is it real?
SEA TALES
Sailors have been telling stories about tentacled sea monsters for thousands of years. Paintings from ancient Greece show giant animals attacking fishing boats. In Norway, sailors feared the mythological kraken, a vicious sea creature with long arms and enormous eyes. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that someone actually brought home hard evidence of one of these “monsters.”
HAUL IT IN!
In 1873, a man and his son were fishing off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, when they saw something that appeared to be a huge squid floating in the water. When the curious fisherman poked the animal, it reared up, wrapped its tentacles around their small boat, and tried to eat it. But the boy took a hatchet, chopped off one of the tentacles, and the creature slithered back into the sea. The pair collected the tentacle (which was about 19 feet long) and brought it back to shore.
The Masai people from Africa eat a traditional dish made from a combination of cow’s blood and milk.
A year or so later, the tentacle—and a complete body of a similar creature that had washed up on the shore of Newfoundland—made their way to a Yale University professor named Addison E. Verrill. He did numerous tests on the animal and finally named the sea monster that sailors had been talking about for centuries: he called it the giant squid.
BODY BASICS
Including its head, body, and tentacles, the average giant squid grows to be between 30 and 40 feet long and weighs several hundred pounds. Females, which are bigger than males, can grow to be 600 pounds or more.
The largest giant squid ever found washed up on a New Zealand beach in 1880. It was 65 feet long, including its 40-foot tentacles. How long is that? About the height of a six-story building.
Giant squid also have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom, approximately 10 inches across—the size of dinner plates. These large eyes make it possible for them to see in the deep, dark waters where they live.
HIDE-AND-SEEK
Giant squid are so rare that it wasn’t until 2006 that scientists were able to film a live specimen. That year, Japanese researchers filmed a 24-foot female in the ocean about 600 miles off the coast of Tokyo.
NOT THE BIGGEST?
It’s hard to imagine, but the giant squid has an even bigger relative: the colossal squid. This creature usually grows to be about the same length as a giant squid, but it’s much heavier.
Since 1925, when the first colossal squid was identified, only six others have been found, and all were in the
ocean off Antarctica. The largest colossal squid ever captured was in 2007: a 1,091-pounder that was 33 feet long. But it was a male. And since scientists know that female squid are usually bigger than males, they believe there are even larger colossal squid hiding somewhere in the ocean.
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GIANT SQUID ARE…
•The world’s largest cephalopods.
•A sperm whale’s main prey.
Beyoncé is allergic to perfume.
CHANGE THE NAME!
Even the simplest things in life aren’t always what they seem.
•Poison ivy isn’t poisonous, it’s allergenic (it causes allergies). If you come into contact with poison ivy, your skin will start itching and swelling, but touching the plant won’t “poison” you. (It’s also not even a type of ivy—it’s a sumac.)
•Only the day you were born is actually your birthday. Each year, you’re really celebrating the anniversary of your birth.
•The Caspian Sea and the Dead Sea aren’t seas at all—they’re both lakes.
•The United States of America is an incorrect term because the nation includes Hawaii. The Pacific islands are not, technically, part of North or South America.
Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! Page 9