WHAT AUGUST HAS FOR US
• On August 1 Lollapalooza begins. This is an annual 4-day music festival based in Chicago. It hosts more than 160,000 people each year.
• On August 2 the World’s Longest Yard Sale begins. It extends 690 miles from Alabama to Michigan; you’ll also find the sale in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia.
• On August 2 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally begins. It’s held in Sturgis, South Dakota, for ten days. It was started in 1938 by a group of Indian Motorcycle riders and was originally held for stunts and races. Attendance has historically been around 500,000 people, reaching a high of over 700,000 in 2015.
• August 9 begins Elvis Week at Graceland in Memphis.
• The Summer Olympics closing ceremony is August 11.
• August 14 is the start of the Little League Baseball World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
• College football returns Saturday, August 24.
• On August 25 Burning Man gets underway in Black Rock City, Nevada
• For tennis fans, August 26 is the first day of the US Open tennis tournament.
ONE IN THREE AMERICANS HAS FORGOTTEN A PARTNER’S BIRTHDAY _ One in three people have forgotten their partner’s birthday — and men are twice as likely to forget. People who’ve forgotten their partners’ birthdays will commit the birthday misdemeanor four times throughout their time together. Traditionally, men have a worse track record for remembering their partners’ birthdays, and results proved this to be true: 52 percent of men have forgotten their partners’ birthdays versus just 24 percent of women. The expectations surrounding birthdays are high. Twenty-eight percent of people expect their partner to do something big for their special day. Thirty-six percent have explicitly told their partner not to do anything for their birthdays but expected them to plan something.
WHAT IF EVERYONE PEED IN THE OCEAN AT THE SAME TIME? _ Here’s a question I know you’ve often asked yourself: “What would happen if everyone peed in the ocean at the same time?” Lauren Wolf, a chemistry Ph.D. out of Maryland, once took it upon herself to find out the scientific truth about what really happens when humans pee in the ocean. Lauren first turned to the internet, of course. As she discovered, though the body excretes urine in order to rid the system of unwanted chemical compounds, it’s not necessarily harmful. In fact, the composition of pee isn’t that different from that of seawater. The average human’s urine is more than 95 percent water and contains 1 to 2 grams per liter of sodium and chloride ions. Upon exiting the body, urine from a healthy human is also sterile. Only once it’s out does it begin to attract existing colonies of bacteria, but it wouldn’t add any to the water. There’s one component that poses a potential problem given its high concentration: urea, a nitrogen-heavy molecule that amounts to a substantial average of 9 grams per liter of urine. In the grand scheme of the ocean however, that’s tiny. Even in the extremely rare scenario that the all the world’s 8 billion citizens peed in the ocean at the same time, there would be a minuscule amount of this urea. And as it turns out, nitrogen is an important fertilizer that contributes to the survival of certain plant species within the aquatic biosphere. So go ahead — pee in the ocean!
