LightGrams (Page 14)
LightGrams February 20, 2020 Volume 24, Number 7 A man in England was recently walking his dog on the beach when he came across a bottle that had washed ashore. Inside was a message from 1938 from John Stapleford, asking whoever found the bottle to write to him in Hertfordshire, England. Attempts to locate this…
LightGrams February 6, 2020 Volume 24, Number 5 If your job is to run a web site to attract tourists to your city, what do you highlight? Highly-rated restaurants? Beautiful local scenery? High crime rates? Lots of things to do? Wait – rewind a bit – “high crime rates”?! Is that any way to attract…
LightGrams January 30, 2020 Volume 24, Number 4 “Prosthesis” is the name given to the world’s largest “tetrapod exoskeleton” (officially recognized by Guinness World Records). “Tetrapod” means it has four legs; “exoskeleton” refers to the fact that a person inside it pilots the movement of this robot. It stands just over twelve feet high, and…
LightGrams January 23, 2020 Volume 24, Number 3 About 14,000 residents of the German city of Dortmund were evacuated over the weekend, according to a story on Yahoo News. The reason for this disruption was bombs; not bombs that were about to be dropped on the town, but bombs dropped by the Allies during World…
LightGrams January 9, 2020 Volume 24, Number 2 Often on any given day I hear the sound of sirens. I know what it means: someone is in distress, and trained professionals are speeding down the road to their rescue. I’m thankful for all who give their lives to this work, whether professionals or volunteers. We…
LightGrams January 2, 2020 Volume 24, Number 1 Every day my web browser presents a variety of articles it thinks I might be interested in. When I have a few extra minutes I’ll look through these, and occasionally find pieces that are worthwhile reads. That’s how I found the article entitled “’They’re abysmal students’: Are…
LightGrams December 19, 2019 Volume 23, Number 40 Gingerbread houses are edible and visual treats that we commonly see around the holidays. Popularized by the fairy tale “Hansel And Gretel”, millions of children have had the thrill of building their own version of these delicious houses. And so has Canadian researcher Travis Casagrande; he has…
LightGrams December 12, 2019 Volume 23, Number 39 I’ll have to admit that I’m impressed with William Clark. Though I’ve never met him, this professor at New York’s Binghamton University set a new Guinness World Record by bending seven railroad spikes in a minute. The previous record of four spikes bent in a minute was…
LightGrams December 5, 2019 Volume 23, Number 38 Heather Langley is a jeweler who works in Bessemer, Alabama. In the summer of 2018 a customer told her about a ring he found in the early 1990s while working at Mount Bachelor in Bend, Oregon. Langley began searching for the ring’s owner using first names engraved…
LightGrams November 21, 2019 Volume 23, Number 37 A family in the United Arab Emirates just set a new Guinness record. They have completed the largest handwritten copy of the Bible on record, and it took them 153 days to do it. The wife, Susan Varghese, began the project, but her husband and two children…