Readable, teachable news.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield will soon be simply, “Mr. Hadfield.”
That’s because he has announced that he is resigning.
In this case, “resigning” means stopping his job as an astronaut.
Hadfield has been an astronaut for 35 years.
Recently, he gained wide popularity after sending photos and videos to Earth from the International Space Station.
Many people around the world enjoyed his tweets and Facebook posts from space.
Four-year-old Gavin Pope of Garfield, New Jersey, loves to cook.
But when his family decided to buy him an Easy-Bake Oven, they found that the colour and packaging made it look like a “girls only” toy.
The Easy-Bake Oven and its box are purple.
The packaging and advertising show only girls baking with it.
So McKenna Pope, Gavin’s 13-year-old sister, started an Internet campaign for a gender-neutral oven.
More than 54,000 people signed the petition.
Hasbro executives met with McKenna and told her they planned to introduce a black, silver and blue oven next fall.
Some businesses in Northern Ireland are getting a facelift before some of the world’s most powerful leaders meet there later this month.
The G8 Summit will take place in Ireland, June 17 to 18.
The G8 Summit brings together the leaders of eight of the world’s wealthiest countries. They are: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the US. The European Union is also represented at the meeting.
More than 100 businesses in a small town called Belcoo have been “spruced up,” according to news agency Reuters.
Some businesses have been made more attractive with fake store fronts. Some ugly and crumbling buildings have been torn down. Others have been covered by huge billboards, according to Reuters.
The businesses are near a golf course where the G8 leaders will meet.
So instead of Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper or U.S. president Barack Obama seeing ugly storefronts, they’ll see posters of nice storefronts instead.
More than $3-million dollars have been spent by the government in Northern Ireland to make the villages look nicer.
At one store, which used to be a butcher’s shop but is now empty, colourful stickers have been put on the windows to make it look like it’s busy inside, Reuters reported.
In Turkey, a country in eastern Europe, a huge protest has been taking place in the largest city, Istanbul.
It started last week when the government wanted to make over a main square, taking away trees and building a shopping mall.
It also planned to rebuild a historical building, a former Ottoman army barracks.
The Ottoman Empire was very strong in Turkey in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Unlike Arab Spring, when many Middle East countries erupted with protests against the government, Turkey’s government has always been seen around the world as more tolerant than many of those countries.
So when cause of the protests seemed to be a local problem, people thought is must be a very different kind of protest.
Hockey Canada – the organization that sets the rules for amateur hockey leagues in Canada – has voted to eliminate bodychecking for peewee players across the country.
The ban will start in September 2013.
One of the main reasons for the ban is safety, says Paul Carson, vice-president of hockey development for Hockey Canada.
Last year, researchers at the University of Calgary found that young players are three times more likely to be injured in leagues where bodychecking is allowed than in leagues with no bodychecking.
The study showed that peewee players in Alberta, where bodychecking was allowed, suffered 209 injuries and 73 concussions.
In Quebec, where bodychecking is not allowed, there were 70 injuries and 20 concussions.
Jiroemon Kimura is the oldest living human being.
Kimura, who lives in western Japan, is 116 years old. He’s the last man alive who has lived in three different centuries.
The only other man who was alive before the 20th century (before the year 1901) was James Emmanuel Sisnett, who died last week at age 113.
Not only is Kimura the oldest man living right now, he is also the oldest man who has ever lived whose birth age can be verified. “Verified” means proved to be true. There are other men who have said they are older than 116, but there wasn’t any way to be certain of the truth.
Kimura worked for the post office until he was 65 and then farmed until he was 90.
He isn’t the only one in his family to live a long time: four of his siblings lived to be 90 or older and one of his brothers made it to age 100.
One of the strangest things about Kimura’s age is that his hometown of Kyotango, Japan, is reported to have 95 centenarians, even though the population of the whole city is just 60,000. “Centenarian” means “over the age of 100.”
How would you like to go to Lego school?
That’s just what some kids will get a chance to do, when the new International School of Billund opens in Denmark this August.
The school was built by the owner of Lego, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, who lives in Billund. He is the grandson of the man who founded the company.
And, just like many kids have built Lego towns, billionaire Kristiansen and his family have used their money to build a church, an airport, a library and a theatre in the town of Billund.
The school will be start with kids aged three to seven and expand to include kids up to age 16 by 2015.
A dome-headed dinosaur skull found in southern Alberta is helping scientists rethink some of their ideas about dinosaurs.
The skull was found in 2008 by a team of scientists led by Dr. David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum.
The skull is about 85 million years old.
The top of the skull is made of a dome-shaped mass of solid bone about 10 centimetres thick.
This means the dinosaur belonged to a group of dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs (“thick-headed lizards”).
The scientists compared the skull to all of the known pachycephalosaur specimens in the world – about 600 of them.
They learned that there are 16 different species within that group, and the skull discovered in Alberta belongs to a species that has never been seen before.
It’s well known that in the 1840s, Ireland suffered from a disaster known as the Irish potato famine.
“Famine” means a “shortage of food.”
More than a quarter of the population of Ireland died or left the country from 1845 to 1852 because of the famine.
For much of the country at the time, potatoes were the main source of food.
The famine had a big effect on Ireland; for one thing, its population is not yet back to pre-famine levels.
The famine happened because the country’s potatoes caught a disease.
At the time, no one knew what the disease was or how to cure it.
To help his home city “bounce back” after a terrible storm, NBA player Kevin Durant has donated $1-million.
The number of people harmed by a recent tornado in the U.S. state of Oklahoma was greatly reduced, thanks to a special early-warning system.
On Monday, a major tornado hit Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City.
A tornado is a violent storm that usually looks like a whirling funnel.
Residents were warned there was a big storm coming, and possibly a tornado, days before it arrived.
When it actually hit, sirens blared, giving people a 16-minute head start to find shelter.
