Bedtime Math

The first Friday in June is National Doughnut Day! This sweet treat was invented in the 1800s to fry cake batter better. Sometimes the outside of the cake would burn while the middle was still undercooked and goopy. So Elizabeth Gregory put walnuts in the middle of th...

Your bed probably has a nice bouncy mattress you can jump up and down on when your parents aren’t looking. Well, in the old days, beds were nothing like that. A bed frame was a wooden rectangle with ropes stretched across it to hold you up. Rich people stuffed lots of feathers under the ropes — but everyone else stuffed the bed with hay, which was itchy and scratchy and full ...

What’s the biggest number of people you’ve seen at once? It may have looked like a lot, but it was only a tiny part of all the people in the world. There are about 8 billion of us, or 8,000,000,000. We don’t even have time to count all those people one by one…a billion seconds is almost 32 years, and it would take even longer to say all the numbers!

Wee ones: ...

Picking a paint color for your house is a big decision. But the funny thing is, your neighbors have to look at the color you pick more than you do. So why not let them choose? That’s what this family did: They posted a photo on...

We all love water squirters to spray our friends. Well, nature wants to play, too. A “geyser” is a burst of underground water that shoots up through the ground. The famous geyser Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park “erupts” exactly every 91 minutes, shooting boiling hot ...