Mama bear and her cub playground slide

A teacher at a North Carolina school captured on video a mother bear and her cub playing on the playground slide outside the building.

Betsie Stockslager Emry, a fifth-grade teacher at Isaac Dickson Elementary School in Asheville, said she was leaving the school’s campus after the school day when she spotted the two bears climbing on the playground equipment.

“This made my day,” Emry wrote on Facebook. “I love how the mama goes down the big slide and quickly runs to the smaller slide — only to bear hug the little one as they make it to the bottom.”

Emry said bears are not an uncommon sight at the school.

“We often have bears visit: our school is in downtown Asheville, and the students are used to going into a perimeter lockdown when the families show up,” Emry told.

A dog with 12-inch long ears!

A black and tan coonhound earned a Guinness World Record when each of her ears was measured at 12.38 inches long. Lou, a three-year-old canine belonging to Paige Olsen, officially has the longest ears on a dog (living).

Olsen said she always knew Lou’s ears were “extravagantly long”, but she only decided to measure them during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Olsen said Lou’s especially long ears have not led to any medical complications for the canine.

Lou is also a competitor at dog shows and has earned titles from the American Kennel Club and Rally Obedience.

Mastodon tooth found in nature preserve

Julian Gagnon, 6, was walking with his family in the Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve (in Michigan nature preserve) when he found an object that he initially identified to his parents as a “dragon’s tooth.”

The family contacted the University of Michigan Museum of Palaeontologists, which identified the discovery as the upper right molar of a juvenile mastodon, a species that lived in Michigan about 12,000 years ago.

Experts said that while both mammoths and mastodons are known to have lived in Michigan, discoveries are rare because scavengers usually took the carcasses of the animals far before they could become fossils.

Here is the world’s whitest paint!

Researchers at Purdue University earned a Guinness World Record with an unusual development — the world’s whitest paint.

Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at the West Lafayette, Ind., school, said the original aim of the project was to create a paint that would reflect sunlight from a building and thereby lower energy usage as a means of fighting climate change.

The paint, which incorporates barium sulphate particles, reflects 98.1% of solar radiation, making the painted surface noticeably cooler than surrounding surfaces. The process of making the paint reflective made the paint extremely white. The barium sulphate was partially responsible for the colour, and the usage of differing particle sizes in the paint caused it to reflect a greater spectrum of sunlight.

Published in Dawn, Young World, September 16th, 2021