Readable, teachable news.
Monday, December 23, 2024
Stephen Hawking turned 70 on Jan. 8.
Cosmologists – scientists like Hawking who study the origins of the universe – gathered in Cambridge, UK, to pay tribute to him.
Hawking was a mathematics professor at the University of Cambridge for 30 years. He retired from that job in 2009. He still works for Cambridge, in cosmology research.
Hawking is a mathematical genius, who changed the way scientists think about the universe.
What do you get when you start with a white room and then give thousands of children coloured dot stickers?
That is exactly what artist Yayoi Kusama wanted to find out.
She painted a room in the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art completely white.
The walls, floor and ceiling were white. The piano was white. The couch, TV and seats were white. Even a fern was painted white.
And then she invited thousands of children inside.
This year, the “euro” celebrates its tenth anniversary.
The euro is a unit of money (or “currency”) that is used by 17 countries in Europe.
It wasn’t always that way.
Before the euro, every country had its own currency.
For instance, France had the franc, Italy had the lira, Germany had the Deutschmark and so on.
The euro was created in 2002 when a group of European politicians and financial leaders decided it would be helpful if they had the same type of money.
The idea of the euro was to make it easier for countries to buy and sell more easily between themselves, because they would all be using the same currency.
Every year, news editors across Canada vote for the “newsmaker of the year” – the person who dominated the headlines.
For 2011, that person was Jack Layton.
A whopping 90 per cent of editors polled said they thought the NDP leader was the newsmaker of the year.
Layton helped to build his political party up from just 19 seats in 2003 when he took over as leader, to 103 seats last year — enough to make the NDP Canada’s national opposition party for the first time in history.
Layton died from cancer in 2011 and the country mourned for this great “representative of the people.”
There were many fascinating news stories in 2011.
Today and tomorrow TKN takes a look at some of the most significant news stories from the past year.
Protests and dissent
The year 2011 may be known as the year of “dissent” – the year people protested. In a number of Arab countries — including Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria and Libya — people took to the streets to protest against their governments and many leaders were ousted.
It was known as the Arab Spring.
There were other protests closer to home. In North America and many other places around the world, young people rose up to protest the growing difference between the rich (the one per cent) and the rest (the 99 per cent).
Cairo, the capital city of Egypt, has a lot of traffic. Commuters often find themselves stuck in a traffic jam, unable to move.
One book store came up with an ingenious program to help the people who take taxis in the city. They call it, “The Taxi of Knowledge.”
Alef Books gives taxi drivers five free books, which they can place in the back seat of their cab.
Passengers can read a good book while they’re stuck in traffic.
The taxi driver gets to choose which books he wants. He can also trade them in whenever he wants, for different books.
Justin Bieber came home for the holidays on Wednesday night – to Canada.
The Stratford, Ont.-born teen idol spread plenty of good cheer while visiting Toronto.
One of the first things he did on arriving in the country was to hold a benefit concert and raise $500,000 for Bieber’s Believe charity, for the Children’s Wish Foundation of Canada, Sunnybrook Foundation and Project Medishare.
The concert, held at Toronto’s historic Massey Hall, was taped for a TV special that aired on MuchMusic and CTV last night. It was called Justin Bieber: Home for the Holidays.
If you type the words “let it snow” (without the quotation marks) into the search engine Google.com or Google.ca*, you probably won’t be surprised when Google gives you back a list of links to the classic Christmas song.
What might surprise you, however, is that it will also start snowing on your computer screen!
Eventually, so much “snow” will fall that your screen will fog up. But don’t worry, you can click on Google’s “defrost” button to clear it again. You can also use your mouse to “wipe” the screen clean.
Two planets have been discovered, about 1,000 light years away from Earth.
Both of the planets are about the size of Earth. Kepler-20e is slightly smaller, and Kepler-20f is slighty larger than Earth.
The surface of the planets are too hot for water to exist on them; it would not be possible for life to exist on them either. They are hot because they orbit close to a star very much like our sun.
Kepler-20e has a termperature of about 760 degrees Celcius. (In contrast, Earth’s average surface temperature is 14 degrees Celsius.)
The planets were discovered during a mission by NASA using the Kepler space telescope. They have been combing the skies searching for planets since about 2009.
The ruler of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, passed away on Saturday.
He died, at age 69, of heart failure.
North Korea’s people know him as “Dear Leader.” They went into the streets to mourn his passing.
However, his death creates a lot of uncertainty about what will happen in North Korea.
Many world leaders are concerned about the situation there now.
One reason is that North Korea has nuclear weapons, so nearby countries like Japan and in particular South Korea, reportedly have their military on “high alert.”
Another reason for concern is that before his death, Kim passed control of the country to one of his sons, Kim Jong-un, who is in his 20s.
Kim Jong-un is largely unknown to other world leaders. In fact, until two years ago, the only picture the CIA had of him was as a student in short pants at a school he was attending in Switzerland.
