"Antarctica" is four percent of the way through the 2024 World Book. Dad joke time: Antarctica is a very cool place! Seriously, though - it has mountain ranges, and its largest inland animal is a half-centimeter-long bug. (Nearly all the animals of Antarctica live on the shore so to have access to the water). Also, if it ever melts, say goodbye to the coasts.

Some cool bug facts I learned: Ants have a neat way of ensuring genetic diversity in their nests! A young queen leaves her home nest and mates with as many male ants as she can find. She stores their semen in her first stomach (ants have two stomachs). She collects all the semen she'll ever use her entire life, then burrows into the ground and starts a colony. Her colony has better genetic diversity because its babies come from different dads throughout her life. Nifty!

Also, today I learned that, like many insects, mosquitos use their antennae to hear things. A male mosquito's antennae can hear a female mosquito up to a quarter mile away. (Anyone who has ever tried to sleep with a mosquito in the room is now thinking "yeah, so can I.")

Finally, a non-bug not-really-fun fact: Susan B. Anthony spend over seventy years of her life fighting to get women the right to vote. She died in 1906, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. Talk about planting a tree whose shade you will never sit under.

...Reading the Susan B. Anthony entry also made me do some quick math and realize: My great-grandmothers (b. 1890, 1894, 1896 and 1902 respectively) spend their entire childhoods in a world that assumed women couldn't, wouldn't, and shouldn't vote. One of my grandmothers was born in 1912; she was eight when women got the right to vote. Those women existed within living memory, as in I remember three of the five of them. I'm going to vote on this school bond issue extra hard in their honor.