Art by Olaf Breuning (See more here)
Not all cats aloof
Pets show their love in different ways. Dogs like to be cuddly and super friendly, while cats can be standoffish - that doesn't mean they don't love their owners! Take a look at Piran, for example. This cat managed to alert rescuers to save her owner who fell 70 feet into a stream: The woman had fallen through barbed wire and come to a stop in a stream below. Tamar Longmuir, 38, was informed of her missing neighbour by the woman's friend and immediately started searching her farm in Bodmin, Cornwall. "The cat is very attached to her, and he was going back and forth in the gateway and meowing, so I decided to go and search the maize field," Tamar Longmuir told reporters. Longmuir then went to the field and started calling the woman's name. At first Longmuir's cows responded but then she heard the woman's call for help. "Without the cat waiting at the gate to that field, it could have been hours later that I or anyone else would have checked there," Longmuir told Sky News.
How they did the Covid 1pm briefing in the olden days
Slow burn
Australia's Mount Wingen has been burning for 6000 years. A lightning strike or brush fire ignited a coal seam there around 4000BC and it's been going ever since. "Smouldering fires, the slow, low-temperature, flameless form of combustion, are an important phenomena in the Earth system, and the most persistent type of combustion," University of Edinburgh fire scientist Guillermo Rein told the New York Times. "The most important fuels involved in smouldering fires are coal and peat. Once ignited, these fires are particularly difficult to extinguish despite extensive rains, weather changes or firefighting attempts, and can persist for long periods of time (months, years), spreading deep (5 metres) and over extensive areas of forest subsurface. Indeed, smouldering fires are the longest continuously burning fires on Earth." The Mount Wingen fire holds the Guinness record for the longest-burning fire in the world.
Always misquoted saying…
Frances writes: "An article about New Zealand's handling of Covid in The Guardian said: 'The proof, experts say, is in the pudding'. Is this the most misquoted well-known phrase of all time? The proof is not in the pudding; the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Now that makes sense!"