International Plant Appreciation Day
April 13
International Plant Appreciation Day celebrates the many benefits of plants in our homes, places of work, and outside. Plants belong to the Plantae kingdom which includes trees, mosses, ferns, herbs, grasses, vines, bushes, and green algae. The main feature of a plant is their green color which is a result of a pigment called chlorophyll. People who study plants are called botanists.
Some interesting fun facts about plants are an average size tree can provide enough wood to make 170,100 pencils. The first type of aspirin, painkiller and fever reducer came from the tree bark of a willow tree. 85% of plant life is found in the ocean. The Amazon rainforest produces half the world’s oxygen supply. Around 2,000 different types of plants are used by humans to make food. There are over 300,000 identified plant species and the list is growing all the time.
Scrabble Day
April 13
Scrabble was invented in 1931 by New York architect Alfred Mosher Butts. The game is sold in 121 countries and comes in 31 different languages. Over 150 million copies of Scrabble have been sold worldwide! If all the Scrabble tiles ever produced were lined up, they would stretch for more than 50,000 miles! In the United States about 33% of all homes own a set. It’s possible to score 1782 points on a single word. That word is Oxyphenbutazone. To get those points, competition player Benjamin Woo played it across the top of the board, hitting three Triple Word Score squares while also making seven crosswords downwards. English Scrabble has 100 tiles. The most tiles are in Italian and Portuguese Scrabble which both have 120 tiles.
Today’s Birthdays of Note….
Thomas Jefferson – 3rd President of U.S. – born in what would become Virginia
Butch Cassidy – Outlaw & Train Robber – born in Beaver, Utah
